We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.

With pundits speculating about the end of American global dominance, a look back on the rise and fall of the world's great powers.

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Call it the fractal geometry of fiscal crisis. If you fly across the Atlantic on a clear day, you can look down and see the same phenomenon but on four entirely different scales. At one extreme there is tiny Iceland. Then there is little Ireland, followed by medium-size Britain. They're all a good deal smaller than the mighty United States. But in each case the economic crisis has taken the same form: a massive banking crisis,...