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Let us make a bold attempt to imagine me incorrect in assuming that America will continually swell to embrace, amalgamate and (handsomely) commodify all forms of opposition, until the world is all America and America is no more.
That formidable effort having somehow ended in success and not laughable failure, there would appear to be three critical obstacles to ending American hegemony, and military force isn't one of them (did I mention Disneyland?): first, America's extraordinary capacity to invent indispensable things (including itself), so that, just as the world begins to break free of the Spell cast by the American invention of the PC, some pencil-pocket geek prophets invent the internet in Stanford, and the world lives American for another century or two; second, Hollywood, the 'factory of dreams'; and last, even more fundamental and intractable, the English language, which America, like any good merchant, is quite happy to bastardize and banalify indefinitely, in order to increase its currency.
Ultimately, this is the currency, not the dollar, which you will have the greatest trouble replacing, I think. And as long as this--or rather some pathetically debased version of it--is the language the world speaks when it talks to itself, that world will remain essentially and always American. Here again it is so not about the oil. English is very simply, and ever-increasingly (since attempts to unseat it will never catch up to the speed of global evolution plus the protean capacity of English to adapt to same) the native language of the global village. You don't have to live there. Wear a loin cloth and eat locusts, it's a free world. But if you choose to live there, and wish to prosper; enjoy the (many) good things it has to offer and avoid the bad; you must, as in any village, learn the native tongue.
A group of anti-American activists from different countries, all with different tongues, gather together to plot the downfall of America, and wish to communicate with the ease and rapidity necessary for true concerted thought and action, without the laborious and finally self-defeating inefficiency of multiple translation. What language will they speak? American.
American English has made its deal with the devil, and traded its soul for worldly power. The devil, a native English speaker, is now firmly on its side, knowing that if it succeeds he will win the soul not merely of America but of the world. His minions, Gates and Jobs. His key weapons, Gates' speed, and man's most incurable addiction: pleasure. As long as the world continues to accelerate down the i-highway, it will only have a greater need for a common tongue, since i, regrettably, needs we to be comfortable at last; and as long as English is not merely the language of America's inventions and movies, but able and willing to whore--I should say adapt--itself to every place and time and circumstance, far better and more easily than any other language on earth, what other possible candidate for that common tongue is there?
It is the native language of Prosperity and Pleasure. And they are bad students of foreign tongues.
The octolingual Slovenian father of a friend of mine said that English was the easiest language to learn badly, and the hardest to learn well. And he was right.
I once took a hurried cab to the Toronto airport, driven by a voluble old man with a heavy Eastern European accent and insanely bad but comprehensible English, who spoke faster than he drove (and that was breathtaking). After a few minutes, in response to some biographical detail, I asked him how long he'd been in Canada. He said 38 years. 'Wow, I said, and you never bothered or needed to learn better English, eh?' Unoffended, he proudly launched into a brilliant demonstration of why that was totally unnecessary to succeed and be happy in my country.
And he was right.

Right.

Brian,

Although you are probably right about the dynamics of the English language in the "global village", I still think you underestimate the living power of language-worlds that continue in parallel with that global lingua franca. English may well act as a sort of currency, but its always exchanged before the non-native speaker goes home, just like I'm sure your taxi-driver did when he got home. I bet his home wasn't in the same world as yours, although he'd answer the door in that American city and say "Hello". Maybe we native English speakers are not used to being colonized, we're not used to having to learn the colonizer's language while keeping our own safe and even secret--but a large part of the world's people have been doing just that for generations and generations--and maybe we underestimate the resilience and adaptability and even cunning of these other worlds that have learned how to survive (with English) in ways native English speakers may only now be beginning to appreciate and only now that this "satanic" global English lingua franca, paradoxically, confronts a native English speaker who has nowhere to hide.

Todd

I'm sorry that last sentence was a little mystical. I got carried away. All I meant was the native English speaker, who I think you'd agree confronts the colonizing effects of global-English lingua franca too, doesn't have another native language to move to, or another language-world to "hide" in. Do you see what I mean?

T.

I was going to open a thread of my own about this strong argument for continuing American supremacy in the world, especially vs. China (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-12/u-s-is-no-1-china-is-so-yesterday).
But I looked around a bit, through some interesting earlier threads here (good site, Geoff!), and found this one, which seems perfect for the argument.
Basically, Joffe (who has some serious credentials) supplies a lot of hard evidence for Brian's first point, about America's endless capacity to invent things (including the future and itself), but he also does a pretty stunning job of putting China's rise into historical (and humbling) perspective, which touches on some of the 'China Century' threads I also discovered in my search--and his argument would be even stronger if he included the two other points Brian makes, about the worldwide influence of American language and culture, since the only power China has, even in the eyes of the China Centuryists, is economic.
Looks like the China Century has come--and gone.

De-dollarization = De-Americanization of the world.
Maybe Paul needs to take a few laps around the treasury.

I post this link contemplating on whether or not America ever has or ever will be a hegemon of this caliber. If the state can put aside it's greed, it's ruthlessness, it's primitive nature to dominate in exchange for helping a state without any ulterior motive. Some may suggest that this stance would be hypocritical for the US to take now if you look at its history. The reason it has become such a powerful state is because the state has rigorously practiced these traits. In response I say, "you can't move forward if you're always looking in the past"