America seems to be waking up to the fact it isn't the world's greatest super power any more and I doubt it's going to go down well when it's bundled together with debt, the style of public politics over there and general anger about living standards decreasing/not improving greatly for most people.
I would suggest the issue is even harder.
America is still the world's strongest power, on practically every scale, and is still top-10 in most per capita rankings as well. The difference is that we're not the ONLY power as we have been since '91. The world from 1991 to 2007 or so (the ending date is fuzzy; you could place it anywhere from 2001 to 2008) could be meaningfully divided into three groups: "US," "US Allies," "Irrelevant Backwater." Or at least it seemed like it could be so divided. And anytime an Irrelevant Backwater got uppity, the US and allies could take care of it (Persian Gulf War, Bosnia).
The US is not so much weaker than it was then (in many ways it is stronger); the difference is that great power politics are returning. The Chinese sphere of influence is just one such factor; India is not so far behind. Anxieties over Japan's rise in the '80's were circumstantially misplaced, but reflected a real problem for the US: how to define foreign policy in absence of a clear existential foe. The US historically has either been isolationist or monopolist. We either don't interact, or we are the only game in town (and if there's another game in town, we will fight it, by proxy or otherwise).
The US learning to handle its role as the strongest of several powers is probably more challenging, because the US still has all its strength with which to !@#$ up. A weak US wouldn't !@#$ up as much; a weak US, lacking in military or economic strength, would not be able to launch military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc, or maintain carrier groups in every ocean. But the US remains quite strong, and so can do those things... and so can colossally screw itself.
Debt... yeah. Should be paid off. Or, rather, we need to be shrinking it relative to GDP. IMHO, growth perspectives, even at their rosiest, don't seem good enough to plausibly suggest that "growing out of debt" is possible for the US. That would require stunning amounts of growth that just doesn't seem likely. Inflating out of debt is hypothetically possible right now, but with how much money has already been pumped into the economy, while hyperinflation is no immediate risk, monetary authorities are wise to be careful. Plus, financial institutions are developing adaptive responses to monetary policy, meaning that most of the research of the past 20 years is increasingly irrelevant.
Which leaves the only meaningful way out of debt as fiscal policy, which will further hamper growth.
Or default, of course. Which, while it many ways it would be catastrophic (especially in terms of what it would do to US retirement funds and pension plans, and Chinese ones), most research has suggested that defaulting on debt in large economies with market power, especially if followed by credible policy change, has comparatively small side effects (comparatively, of course, referencing hypothetical costs of paying the pre-default obligation plus future interest).
