A worrying new study emerges from the Pentagon. Called "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World," it makes sober reading for all of America's allies.

The document, based on extensive consultation with leading defense authorities in all branches of the U.S. military, as well as on a number of think tank inputs, gloomily asserts that American power is in major decline, that the pre-eminence of America and its allies that emerged from World War II, and its further enhancement by the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now no more and that "the rules-based global order which the United States built and sustained for seven decades is now under enormous stress," and generally unravelling.

Civil unrest, the report adds, is likely to become prominent in Western homelands as legitimate governments are weakened everywhere.