US decline is opportunity for others

THIS current bout of Washington inanity is approaching its denouement, but however it ends, it has accelerated a trend that has been gathering steam for at least the last five years — the move away from a Washington-centric world and towards a new, undefined, but decidedly less American global system.

The latest broadside was the widely disseminated editorial in China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, which called for a “de-Americanised world” that no longer depends on the dollar and is thus no longer at the whim of “intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States”.