We are in the early stages of what soon will be obvious to most Americans. Our empire is in decline and it’s irreversible. Despite being the biggest military power on the planet, we continually lose at the conflicts we often provoke. All the hooting and hollering about how Exceptional the US is won’t change that. Our internal politics may well get even uglier as the various snarling factions blame the others for this collapse of empire. Externally, many nations, especially the BRICS, are already planning and working towards a world where the US and the dollar just isn’t particularly important.
All of this includes NSA, which despite its blustering just isn’t very good at what it does. They collect massive amounts of data yet say they have no coherent way to access it in a timely manner.
Ask yourself: who benefits from military spending, the war machine, and the internal surveillance state? The elites don’t much care if the US wins or loses, only if they profit
Helpless Giant: How Imperial US Elites Tied America Down All by Themselves
Recent history is clear: [the US] military has proven incapable of winning its wars against minor (and minority) insurgencies globally, just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and economic, has had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere on the planet. Though it may still look like a superpower and though the power of its national security state may still be growing, Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into anything resembling success.