Anyone looking at NATO and NORAD right now, and thinking - hmmm. Them Americans are weak... are not paying very much attention to the current state of the world.
>By more than a two-to-one margin, Americans say their country’s influence in the world has been getting weaker rather than stronger in recent years (47% vs. 19%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this past spring.
Meanwhile in Russia, America is winning a war it's not even fighting in - at least according to the russian press. In all seriousness, using a fraction of the USA's military backlog and supplies, Ukraine is holding Russia at bay. A comparative alliance is taking place in the Pacific. Everyone wants to be in the NATO club (more or less, American protectorates, but with a lot more democracy) while The US economy is steamrolling through what everyone assumed would be a bad recesion, and people are starting to talk about Peak China.
So yeah, MSNBC and Fox are good at pointing out everything wrong, but the facts on the ground are very very different at this moment.