As we stay in the same rut, what is needed is original thinking. The only perceptible sign that someone close to the decision-making process in Washington may be thinking useful thoughts on this subject is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who now serves as head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He has spoken recently about taxes on fuel and financial transactions which would be huge revenue generators, reduce oil imports and help prevent the re-emergence of a bloated financial industry. 

There is no sign that any of the major debt-heavy economic blocs has any real disposition to pay its debt down instead of devaluing the currency in which it is denominated. But none of the major currencies is really worth anything and they are all just measured against each other. They are like mountain-climbers on a bare face, connected to each other but not to anything secure. The Chinese have impressive foreign reserves, but not a word of their economic claims and statistics is corroborated or believable. By traditional standards, Australia, Canada, Norway, Singapore and the Swiss have the world's only hard currencies. 

With inflation removed from the figures, the annual rise in stock market values since 1929 is a very sober four per cent or so and not largely greater than productivity increases. There is no painless way to bring down the crippling debt and no apparent political will to do so. The most sensible national leaders in these terms are Germany's Angela Merkel and Canada's Stephen Harper. Yet they are not the greatest rousers of opinion since Peter the Hermit. Obama simply refuses to address the issue. His predecessor, George W. Bush, uttered the stirring tocsin, "The sucker could go down," by which he meant the US economy, not the army of voters who had twice elected him to his great office. 

The greatest problem in the West is the European death-wish. This anaesthetising torpor has transformed the exaggerated hopes of a united Europe regaining its status at the centre of the world it enjoyed 100 years ago. It is now almost incapacitated by a financial problem in Greece. The looming problems of Europe will require a political de-socialisation and recovery of procreational energy or all those ancient nationalities will fade away like the North American carrier pigeon, which darkened the skies in Audubon's time but passed into extinction in Cincinnati in 1922. Europe will have to redefine itself sensibly, incentivise work and demographic renewal, stop replacing the unborn with immigrants who don't want to assimilate, and pull back from the road to extinction.

Although one who was very vocal in my reservations about Britain joining the euro, when I had some standing to make my views known, it gives me no pleasure to see it in such straits. Southern Europe appears to have signed on to a German-backed hard currency after filing a false prospectus about its own financial condition. I don't see how those countries can be revived without local devaluation that, at the least, will require two currencies — a southern and a northern euro. Continuing to throw money at the problem in such huge dollops could bring down the whole structure. It is time for the Euro-federalists to engage in an agonising reappraisal.

Europe after the hecatomb produced by its Nazi, communist and fascist movements was essentially liberated, revived and coddled by the US until the Soviet threat imploded. In the ensuing euphoria, the old continent had an intense flirtation with a continental political fantasy. And the US has authored one of recent history's prominent ironies. It rose with unprecedented swiftness in two long lifetimes, from 1783 to 1945 from fragile colonies to half the economic product of the world, a nuclear monopoly, huge moral authority and cultural influence and overwhelming military strength. 

It won the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation state in the Cold War, crowning half a century of inspired strategic policy. All aid short of war (1939-1941); the conduct of the Second World War in overall planning by Roosevelt and Marshall and in all theatres by Eisenhower, Nimitz and MacArthur; and the containment of communism under nine consecutive presidents of both parties earned the US its unprecedented primacy. Inexplicably, with all rivals laid low, the US has spent more than 15 years trying to spend itself richer and to drink itself sober.