Maybe this persons book gives more information as to where he gathered this data to support his views.....

I question, if this is true, then why is America, it seems, the world police and "aid" giver, if everyone else is putting themselves first?

The story seems feasible, I just don't know much about it.....

Get Over Yourself, America

The rest of the world couldn’t care less about Donald Trump.

By PARAG KHANNA January 19, 2018

For the past few weeks, we’ve been deluged by various retrospectives on Donald Trump’s first year in office. Many made valuable contributions to our understanding of this, shall we say, unique figure in U.S. presidential history. Yet all had the same fatal flaw: the fashionable trait of heaping blame on Trump for America’s abdication of global leadership. Even seasoned American diplomats have lambasted Trump for rupturing ties with Europe, never mind that the same accusation was leveled at George W. Bush over a decade ago for brushing aside the concerns of “Old Europe” over the Iraq war, and even more recently at Barack Obama for neglecting Europe in favor of a “pivot” to Asia.

If one man could bring down an empire, America would have collapsed several times over in just the past two decades. After all, in 2007 it was fashionable to blame President George W. Bush for imperial overstretch in light of the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That helped President Barack Obama win the 2008 election, but his presidency clearly did not so substantially restore American prestige that it could not be quickly dismantled by Trump—otherwise these trite commentaries would have little to complain about. The facile nature of circular logic that conflates individual personality with national power is already self-evident.

So too is America’s self-centric worldview in an age where globalization has many drivers beyond the United States. China is the top trading partner of more than 120 countries, versus just over 50 for the U.S. Europe exports more capital around the world than America does. Japanese capital is funding AI research around the world. Russians are again selling weapons everywhere.

For Americans, these trends point toward some uncomfortable questions. Why did Asian economies continue to grow so fast in the decade after America’s Great Recession? Why did European allies join the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank despite heavy U.S. opposition? Why have all countries—including close U.S. allies such as Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia—participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership carried forward with plans to deepen a major trading zone even after the Trump withdrew the U.S. from negotiations as soon as he assumed office?

It turns out that the global system is underpinned by more powerful forces than either the whims of America’s president or even the country’s enormous military and economic weight. In fact, America’s once-dominant position in the world has been steadily declining since the 1970s when Japan’s rise and Europe’s consolidation into the EU brought two new centers of gravity, followed of course by China and now India, as well as a revived Russia, as geostrategic anchors. All of them are intensifying their relations with each other as well as with other regional powers from Saudi Arabia to Brazil—no matter what edicts are pronounced in Washington. American officials speak about accommodating China’s rise as if it were still up to them. But our collective international society wants only one thing: More connectivity among its members. Globalization has turned the world from a pyramid with America at the top into a spiderweb. To make a celestial analogy, geopolitical order is not a solar system with one star in the center around which all planets rotate. It is more like a constellation, a pattern of bright stars bound by mutual gravity.

Early 2008 seemed an odd time to make this argument. The “surge” in Iraq appeared to be solidifying America’s mission; many still spoke comfortably of American hegemony. But as I argued in a January 2008 cover essay for the New York Times Magazine (adapted from my book The Second World) titled “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” the end of the Cold War meant that many countries no longer had to choose sides. Instead, dozens of the most important swing states on every continent realized their interests would be best served by pursuing multi-alignment, gaining benefits from America, Europe, China and other suitors all at the same time.

So Trump, like Obama before him, is really just an accessory to what has been happening for at least the past quarter century: the rise of a truly multipolar world. Over this period, from 9/11 and the Iraq war through the financial crisis, rising inequality and divisive populism, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, in particular, have suffered a brutal demotion in their legitimacy. Especially after Brexit, Europe is refocused on pooling its economic and strategic assets and is parting ways with the U.S. on how to move forward with Russia, Iran and China. In these critical cases, Europe favors engagement to the American approach of containment. Europeans aren’t focused on building ties with Asia because of Trump but because their annual trade with Asia’s major economies is nearly $500 billion more than their trade with America—a trend that long predates Trump.

Since the 1990s, China, too, has scarcely wavered in its ambition to use infrastructure and commercial investment to reorganize Asia to its liking. In Second World, I wrote that “China is winning the new Great Game by building the new Silk Roads” of railways and pipelines across Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and other frail post-Soviet and post-colonial states. All of this was happening while the U.S. and Europe were focused on old conflicts: the Balkans and Iraq. The West only took notice in the past two years once China put a name—the Belt & Road Initiative—to what had long been underway.

These are examples of structural shifts in the distribution of global power and authority, meaning they are long-lasting and not likely to be undone. We have a natural tendency to favor cyclical patterns, hoping for rise to immediately follow decline, indicating that the present trend is merely a blip. But even if America recovers its economic dynamism and social cohesion, why would this stop Europeans and Asians, Arabs and Africans, from aggressively pursuing their own visions for their future? Should they suddenly follow the next American president’s lead just because he or she isn’t Donald Trump?

Anyone paying attention to how leaders around the world think over the past three decades ought to have noticed that “Japan First” and “China First” long predated “America First,” and now we have “India First” and “Europe First” as well. Deference to America falls far down the list of any nation’s priorities, no matter who the U.S. president may be.

The truly important trends in the world today are thus Trump-agnostic, especially the massive growth in inter-regional diplomatic and commercial activity that bypasses the U.S. Most of the world’s energy trade and goods shipping passes along the maritime corridors between Europe, the Gulf states and Asia across the Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic or Pacific. Don’t confuse a global public chattering about Trump with caring about him—or even about America. Every sensible country’s goal is to avoid excessive dependence on any foreign power. There was nothing predetermined about Trump’s election victory, but there is an inevitability to globalization continuously connecting supply and demand across the world and circumventing any obstacles in its path.

The United States, due to its unique geography and political history, is probably the most self-absorbed country on the planet—and it’s been hard for American leaders to adjust to a world in which the U.S. is one star in the constellation and not the North Star of the entire sky. To be influential in the unfolding era requires not retreating inward or containing others, but the exact opposite: being as connected as possible to all other nodes of power. This logic should guide not only America’s current president, but anyone who comes after it.

Well, what do you think?

It's like the biggest tither at church folk love to gossip about  

Or, am I extremely biased and propagandized by my thinking America is greater than she is?

Is this fear mongering, or factual, like when you loan a buddy a few more bucks because he busted playing poker..... just to keep the game going, and he comes back and cleans everyone out and goes home with the loot?  

No.
After three or four paragraphs I looked down. If you pick some salient points, maybe you can get interest up.

I post links that indicate something in the link itself.
I post about current events or items that prove a point.
I don't know what you have here.
I read some of it and it was not exactly holding my attention.
Now, if there is something in there that makes a point, I'll be happy to look at it.