The solvency of the United States and the balance between commitments and power has been an abiding theme of foreign policy realists. In his book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, the dean of American realist thinkers, Walter Lippmann, observed in 1943:
No one would seriously suppose that he had a fiscal policy if he did not consider together expenditure and revenue, outgo and income, liabilities and assets. But in foreign relations we have habitually in our minds divorced the discussion of our war aims, our peace aims, our ideals, our interests, our commitments, from the discussion of our armaments, our strategic position, our potential allies and our probable enemies. No policy could emerge from such a discussion. For what settles practical controversy is the knowledge that ends and means have to be balanced: an agreement has eventually to be reached when men admit that they must pay for what they want and that they must want only what they are willing to pay for.In 1987, Samuel Huntington wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called "Coping With the Lippmann Gap." He reiterated that America was incurring commitments abroad that it was not willing to pay for at home. Such warnings have gone largely unheeded.
Instead, since the end of the Bill Clinton presidency - when the United States ran a budget surplus - the debt level has been rising steadily. It jumped from $10.6 trillion during the George W. Bush administration to $19.9 trillion under Barack Obama. Though Donald Trump said in 2017 that he would eliminate the debt "over a period of eight years," he has gone silent on the issue even as he presides over a debt that is expected to exceed $21 trillion. Goldman Sachs recently stated that the fiscal outlook for the United States is "not good" and predicts that debt as a percentage of the gross national product will rise from its current 4.1 percent to 7 percent by 2028.
Comment: An interesting trend, that's for sure.
It's the One World digitized credits system 'conspiracy theorists' warned about decades ago.
The trade-off seems to be: the popular dream of cutting out banksters as middlemen is realized... in exchange for super-sized conglomerates that are part-monopolies, part-governments-unto-themselves.
The incredible thing about it is that China, which has yet to complete its transition to a modern economy, is 'forcing' this development in the West by the act of forging ahead with it.