“International primacy” can be defined as a government’s ability to exercise more influence on the behavior of other governments with respect to more issues than any other government can exercise. It is a function, then, of weight, of power.

Empires will rise and fall, as they have since the beginning of recorded time. There have been many. The Roman Empire, the Manchu Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Spanish and British Empires all had their time upon history’s stage. They all had primacy in their day and in what was then the world, as they knew it.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in about 1989 to 1990, the United States has stood alone as history’s only truly global power with primacy over the entire world. The question for us today, then, is does the United States government want to remain a credible global power with world primacy? If so, what is it going to do to make that happen?

There are, basically, two views of history. The first we can call “the Mistake,” or the “Accidental View” or the “Negligence View.” I like to call it “the Dumb” or “Stupid View.” A person who holds that view believes that things happen internationally in politics because of the blunders and stupid mistakes of the world’s politicians.