the only solution to remaining the global hegemon...

Even though things are going better across most of the planet, it is much more likely that things will get worse before they get better overall. The continuing transition of China and India from planned economies to market economies will be very difficult--their rising demand will increase the prices of many commodities, which will of course spur the development of more efficient means of producing and or obtaining those resources. One of the best ways to spur innovation is to create pressure necessary for the resolution of either general or specific scarcity. As the chronically underdeveloped world begins to adopt real market economies and representative governments, we can be assured that they too will gobble up resources as quickly as they can produced, and, at the same time and that consequently, over the short term, prices across the board will probably increase. But, we must keep in mind, that price for all commodities have fallen relative to inflation over time, and the same will hold true for the long term in any situation. This isn't really what I had planned on talking about, but it sort of leads into my real topic of concern: colonization.
The United States has been an expansionist nation since its inception. One of the driving ideas behind America is still "manifest destiny", whether or not it is applied to the concept of filling up a continent or in our current top dog position in the international pecking order. That top spot will not simply maintain itself though. There always people and nations vying to reduce, mitigate or end our global domination, and I for one, am not in favor of having any nation but my own be in charge, especially when faced with the other possibilities. China, forget about it. Russia, really forget about it. Brazil? I mean, come on. The European Disunion? Please, somebody stop me. So for everyone out there who complains about the little things that don't really in the long run matter, let's just put the rest of the world in perspective. Sure, Europe is a nice to visit, even live, so long as you don't have to work for the country in which you're living, unless it's one of the Eastern Europeans who have wisely adopted such long-run ideas as the flat tax and their growing opposition to the draconian regulation and idiotic structure of the European Union. Would anyone in the West want to live in what is about to become the most polluted nation in the world, namely China, and a terrible male/female demographic relationship in my age group, with I think four males to every one female. Of course, that's been a chronic historical problem for China, and probably one of the real reasons why Chinese society was never able to expand its zone of influence beyond what is now and what has always been China. The point is that there isn't another nation-state in the world that is as good as ours is, and there probably never will be again. So, the answer is obvious: instead of trying to teach through example and through painful lesson when necessary, we should get the fudge out. And right now, at this moment in time, no other nation or group of nations has the capability to go out and colonize as much of the Solar System as we can before anyone else does. Think of the headstart it will give us in terms of future domination of the Solar System. We can follow the example of our forebears and simply remember how the Constitution instructs in adding new territories and states. Before the Chinese can even get a man on the moon we could have several hundred, no, several thousand people LIVING on the moon. Before the European Space Agency can send three sprite young Euroadultkids to visit Mars, we could have a whole underground town and vast industrial projects already belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Before Brazil starts scouting the asteroid belt for mineral desposits we could already have claimed all of them. Right now we have the opportunity to do what we didn't do in 1945--create the necessary conditions for our continued and expanded dominance of the planet. In 1945 we could have smashed both the Russian and the Chinese into submission and began the process of continuing Manifest Destiny by annexing Japan, Germany, and all the islands and areas that we "liberated" from the Axis powers. Then we could have begun the process of Americanizing first as territories and then, eventually, as states within the Union. Ah, but you say that's no better than the brutish Romans--well, you know what, I'm convinced that the ingratitude of most of the people that we liberated in the past century is because they're upset that we didn't just make them full Americans instead of just treating them to our media, fashion, technological, scientific and every other thing that America leads the world in.
QUICK SUBSCRIPT: I'm sure that there are other people in the world who feel as passionately about their nation-state as I do about mine. But no other nation-state is in the position of the United States. What would it take to begin colonizing the moon, say tomorrow? How much would it cost? Does cost really matter when you're talking about expanding the range of human settlement and influence. If we really are life engineered to bring order to chaos then we should view such adversity with great enjoyment; indeed, such adversity is exactly what challenges us. How many new technologies will the initial colonization of the Moon and Mars require that we can't even imagine right now? How many of those technologies would have an impact upon life here on Earth? And don't you think that the rest of the world will begin to view with awe and wonder at the power, scope, magnitude and immensity of the United States?
Since we don't have a flux capacitor and we don't have Doc Emmett Brown sitting right here next to me working on it, we can't go back and convince Patton to go about forcing a conflict between the Soviet Union and us in a more subtle manner, we need to work from where we are now, which is the only nation with the resources to begin space colonization right now. Hell, if we wanted to, we could start building an intergenerational ship that could begin searching for habitable planets in our neighboring star systems. There's nothing preventing us from constructing such a vessel. There's nothing preventing us from assembling producting facilities at the various Lagrange points that could construct a ship in orbit; what would it need? Ten nuclear reactors, maybe a few more? Be a kilometer long and have a crew compliment of five hundred couples, hyrdoponics, and other renewable resources onboard for consumption? We can build massive stone structures without the use of any technology thousands of years ago, but we can't have a little fortitude now and face facts: if we want the human race to survive, we have to get off this planet. Every 62 million years or so, massive extinctions happen across the planet. The most likely explanation is that as the Solar System orbits the galaxy, it doesn't do so in a straight line, rather, the Solar System dips up and down like a sine wave, as it descends into the denser region of the galaxy, the possibility that our Solar System and other systems will come into close contact are much higher. Think of this way: a massive ring of debris called the Kuiper Belt and, even further out, the Oort Cloud, orbit our Sun. Similar debris rings probably surround other star systems as well, meaning that when two star systems come into close contact, the larger star's gravity will pull the material that surrounds the smaller star toward it, and since our star is not a very large star when compared to the rest of the galaxy, we are almost always on the receiving end of what is essentially a slingshot. As the material in the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper belt are pulled towards the more intense gravitional attraction, they are also pulled away from our Sun--this is all fine and good until the Solar System begins it's thirty some odd million year exit to where we are essentially right now, on the outer edge of the galaxy, at which point the material will retract and then be shot into the inner Solar System. Really, though, we've been quite lucky--most of the incoming material is probably absorbed by Jupiter and the other gas giants, but, it only takes one object of enough size to devastate our little planet. And it's been more than sixty-two million years since the last mass extinction took place, so, really, we're due for one any minute now. The sooner we get at least some people off the planet, the sooner we will be closer to guaranteeing that somewhere, some people will always survive. And that should be the long term goal: the survival and eventually, the dominance of human across not just the planet, not just the Solar System, not just the galaxy, but across the known universe.
The federal government could begin fostering this process by offering colonists favorable incentives, like paying no federal income taxes for your first ten years of colonization or something along those lines. It could accelerate private initiatives by constructing space ports across the country and by creating flight regulations for space flight and colonization procedures and such. It should help create a network of fuel stations and the basics of life, such as utility lines from main government bases that could serve as the hub while the outlying settlements would the spokes, from which new settlements could grow.
The sooner we start, the sooner we can expand to other planets, and the sooner we can get out of this Solar System and find a planet that we can call New America and dispense with bogus international relations and other formalities that are really just crap.
Well, gotta move tomorrow, so, this is Ripley, signing off.