G. Frink's

Steve Coll brings into focus how Republican stewardship of the economy may have abruptly ended the post-Cold War "era" of U.S. hegemony.

In The New Yorker's Think Tank blog he calls our new predicament Debtor's Dilemma.

Because we are debt-hobbled, "our expeditionary armies in Iraq and Afghanistan will be harder to finance." But there are other, more important effects.

Coll explains:

In 1956, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, previously a British asset. Britain, France, and Israel intervened militarily and occupied the canal zone. President Dwight Eisenhower objected and sought to pressure Britain to accept a United Nations-supervised plan for withdrawal. Britain had borrowed heavily from the United States during the Second World War and was vulnerable to the demands of its creditor. To squeeze London, Eisenhower conditioned direct U.S. financial support and backing for a loan to Britain from the International Monetary Fund on Britain’s acceptance of withdrawal. The tactic worked. As the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden put it, "We were therefore faced with the alternatives, a run on sterling and the loss of gold and dollar reserves till they fell well below the safety margin…or make the best we could of U.N. takeover and salvage what we could."

We appear to have made ourselves vulnerable to similar pressures.

Please read the entire piece.