US may collapse as a superpower: analyst

A senior Japanese diplomat said to me, last year, he said "You know the United States is a twelve year old with a shotgun". And what he meant was that as the United States begins to suspect that it's past the apogee of its trajectory, its on the way down, as a great power no longer on the way up or at the top securely, that it is becoming extremely erratic, that is lashing out in all sorts of ways to try and slow or stop what it perceives as incipient decline.

So there is concern that we're getting into rather deep water here, that we may be going into an era where the Americans become highly unpredictable and quite dangerous.