When they want something to happen they tell you it's inevitable

The American elites, I mean.

It's happening, America, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's happening whether you like it or not.

Get used to it.

That's what the people who run America have told us for decades about the browning of America.

And that's what they are telling us now about the waning of American global power.

Obama’s Implicit Foreign Policy

Cohen of The Times puts this line in his fictional Obama's soliloquy.

Restraint was the wiser option for a chastened America unready to pass the mantle but condemned now to share it.

Pass the mantle? Share it?

Cohen pretends that's what's happening to disguise the reality.

It's one thing to choose to abandon the role of globocop, finally taking the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War.

It's another to by your own policies make your enemies and your competitors so numerous, so powerful, and so politically mature that you cannot any longer impose your will.

In the second case much more alarmingly than in the first your safety and even your survival depend on the choices of others who do not love you.