Regrettably, whoever takes over as U.S. president and commander in chief in January will face a rapidly narrowing range of options. With the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the United States was given an almost limitless range of options. A series of bad decisions since that time has reduced that range to a paltry few, none of them particularly attractive. Running the narrows with a ship of state is a perilous enterprise.

In foreign affairs, most of the rest of the world is now hoping to see the United States take a fall. We have alienated the Russians, irritated the Chinese and dragged the Europeans into a "war against terror" that finds little support outside ruling elites.

Virtually every European public would vote to pull out of Afghanistan tomorrow, if given the chance. The elites go along only because of a residual fear of "losing the Americans," much as the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II feared "losing the Austrians" if it did not support the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg Emperor Franz-Josef in the crisis that led to the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. Both were allied to a corpse, which at some point even the bureaucrats who govern the major nations of the European Union may discern.

Militarily, the United States has managed the contortionist's feat of getting various body parts stuck in different pits of quicksand. The United States counts on Iraq gaining stability, but the absence of a state means it can go unstable again overnight. The Afghan war is going the way Afghan wars do, as the Pashtun tribes slowly get their act together to push the occupier out.

Spillover from the war in Afghanistan is destabilizing Pakistan, with Washington accelerating the process by putting impossible demands on Iran or Israel acting as a proxy, which in turn would pitch Iraq back into chaos as all the Shiite militias in southern Iraq gang up on us.

But the looming crises in the Middle East cannot be seen in isolation: They will come in combination with, and will have to be confronted in the context of, a critical economic upheaval and collapse of confidence.

For the money is about to run out for the U.S. government. And the American people seem to have forgotten that no activity the state can undertake is more expensive than war. If a tanking economy cuts off the money flow, what comes next?

(In Part 2: America's looming financial crisis.)

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)

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