If China was for many decades a sleeping giant, then the United States of America has become an ageing giant with chronic narcolepsy. Perhaps this is just another way of saying the US elite has lost the plot: but I see it more as a government that has both lost its raison d’etre – and cannot grasp a future that looks inevitable.

I’ve spent years doing business in the States, and travelling there. I have close family who are now, effectively, Americans. I still have good friends there – and useful sources. But today, I see an America that is a decadent perversion of its once genuine ambition of ‘anything’s possible’.

The money is in fewer and fewer hands, the business is done in bigger and bigger units, and the financial system is no longer the servant: it has become a dysfunctional master on its way to becoming a monster. The USA isn’t doing business any more, it’s doing crooked deals that benefit a tiny minority. The raison d’etre for financial houses has been forgotten – the money they generate is no longer entrepreneurial. It is driven by avarice and piled up by egomaniacs.

In the White House is a President who told the US he could, but he can’t. There is much talk of levies and taxes and regulation, but these are not old prison lags he’s dealing with: these are sophisticated, hugely powerful men and women with no sense of either ethics or social responsibility. Lloyd Blankfein has made it clear in private that he will starve the Democrats of money, and ‘get’ Obama. Lloyd doesn’t need regulating, he needs deporting. Only a different, totally reformed system run by different minds is going to achieve what the US needs to get back to being a world powerhouse. There is no desire on Wall Street or in Washington to do this.

There is also little or no awareness of how output capacity and competitive exports have been hugely eroded by Asian power. This means that the size of the US deficit is, for the first time, a very serious problem – not just the unique size of the thing, but also because there is global doubt among creditors that the wealth can be created before the debt spirals out of control.

In this sense, the US is not only miles behind the UK and Europe, it is heading in the opposite direction. The time and place for introducing a universal healthcare bill would’ve been around 1961. 2010 was the worst year since 1777 to have done it. The commercial naivety behind the passage of this bill terrifies me, and angers many Americans. It is in soccer terms a free-kick for the far Right.

But if Obama continues to draft $30 billion stimulus bills (and behave as if he believes the tosh being put out by Bernanke and Wall Street), the effect of real hardship is already apparent at state level. In New Jersey schools, classes are being cut. In California, public sector employees are not getting paid. In New York, a subway extension has just been cancelled. And in places such as Illinois and San Diego, pension benefits are being renegotiated altogether. This is taboo territory even for the American Right.

One of the supreme problems that came with digital telecoms and the complexity of trading is the sheer speed at which computerised things happen. What’s happening in America is that the country is going through a sixty-year decline process in sixty months. Only a few contrarian minds here and there have spotted this. For the Obama administration, it isn’t even on the radar. But for many real Americans at the sharp end of joblessness – watching a ‘recovery’ that sputters and backfires – there is a very real sense that something fundamental is changing.

The mood on Main Street USA is something new in my lifetime. What began as doom-laden pessimism in 2008 has become a fearful stoicism two years on. Just as the Blair/Brown hegemony and its accolytes in the civil servant and public sectors lost touch with the real Britain, so too is Barack Obama’s Presidency nowhere near the pulse….and the patient could be dead by the time his people realise there’s a serious illness.

Britain and Europe owe America a great deal. Without FDR’s support, the Nazis would’ve won. Without US determination to beat the USSR in defence technology, that awful system would never have gone fiscally as well as morally bankrupt. But the Special Relationship has been a joke for decades. We finished paying off the Lend-Lease sum three years ago. For me, the debt is repaid, and the specialness has gone. The British no longer trust the Americans. The last two weeks have shown us once more how Xenophobic hysteria there can so easily be whipped up by a jingoist media set…led as always by their adopted citizen, Rupert Murdoch. To many Brits in 2010, ‘American ally’ is an oxymoron.

The UK is not important to the US, and why should it be? Instead of scuttling off to Washington the day after taking office, William Hague should’ve ignored the braindead FCO and looked more closely at the gathering storm inside the EU.

The next piece in this series will do just that.