I may have talked before about the huge freighters that enter New York harbour these days weighed down with electrical appliances and other manufactured goods from China.

So large are these vessels that new facilities are being constructed to receive them. Even the giant cranes used for unloading were made in China and delivered in Chinese ships.

Across the country, in California, the freeways leading out of Los Angeles are so crowded these days with trucks carrying Chinese goods from the port of Long Beach that the state is considering installing a super-advanced Maglev railway to relieve the pressure.

Needless to say, the leading pioneers of Maglev transportation these days are Chinese. Shanghai has the biggest working model and others of its type are planned. I have absolutely no doubt that when California makes its decision, Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers will be intimately tied in to the deal.

The statistics of US-China trade are staggering. In January 1986, America exported goods and services worth $$300m to the People's Republic. Imports from China in the same month were valued at $$460m, creating a deficit of $$160m.

Twenty years later, in January 2006, exports to China had reached $$4.9bn, while imports soared to $$29bn. The deficit in China's favour was more than $$24bn.

In the first 10 months of last year, the trade imbalance hit $$190bn, suggesting a year-long deficit approaching a quarter of a trillion dollars. In total, the amount America now owes to China is estimated at four times that: an astonishing one thousand billion dollars.

Who is to say where the graph is headed? Already, Beijing has a lock on the dollar. It refuses to revalue the Yuan to take account of the obvious underlying strength of its currency, and without support from the Bank of China and the Chinese business community, the US Government would be forced into bankruptcy.

A week ago, Eliot Spitzer, the new governor of New York, speaking in his inaugural address, compared his State to Rip Van Winkle. It had been asleep for the last 10 years, he said, and allowed the rest of the world to pass it by.

He could have been talking of the United States as a whole. One of the key conceits of America is that it is more advanced, more developed than other countries. But anyone who has travelled around Europe, or Japan, or Australia, or South Korea knows that this isn't so.

The same world travellers would also report astonishing improvements in the infrastructure and economies of India and, of course, China.

Behind the surface glitz, there is a late Victorian feel to much of America, which is at odds with its reputation as civilisation's cutting edge.

The US remains in the lead in just two key areas: computers and weapons technology.

But computer know-how is spreading like wildfire and it is highly likely that China and India will nudge into the lead within 20 years.

As for weaponry, what good have smart bombs and satellite targeting been in Iraq? How useful has it been to the USAF or Navy that they could, if they wished, nuke the Middle East out of existence?

The fact that America can still kick more butt than the rest of the planet combined is increasingly not a fact at all, but an abstract assumption that dare not be tested.

It might also be argued that America is number one in space travel. But how long will its lead survive? Its shuttles are old and unreliable and there has been little or no progress in building a successor.

The US might indeed make good President Bush's boast that it will be the first to land on Mars, but what's the betting that China, Russia and Europe won't in the meantime colonise the Moon and set off for Europa?

Behind everything that I have listed above is one debilitating truth. Public education in the US is bad and getting worse by the day. Sure, there is Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and the rest. The nation's top universities are the finest and richest in the world.

But increasing numbers of students at the top US colleges are foreign, mainly Asian.

It was reported last weekend that 41% of students at Berkeley, part of the University of California, are already Asian, and the proportion is growing.

Most bright young Americans want to be doctors, lawyers or business executives.

They have drifted away from science and engineering to the extent that America now needs its annual influx of foreigners just to replace those native academics and experts who are coming up for retirement.

It is probably a cliché to say that the US has reached the stage achieved by the Roman Empire after, say, the year 300AD, or that of the British Empire in 1900. But it is also probably true.

The benign scenario in all this would be for America to buckle down and accept its altered status. If it were to cut back sharply on defence spending (starting with an early withdrawal from Iraq), it could begin to spend more on education, health and social welfare, while upgrading its roads and railways and redynamising industry.

It could also start concentrating on what it has always been brilliant at: science and culture. A new silver age could beckon.

But don't count on it anytime soon. They don't know how to juggle the pieces any more. The Great Game has been reduced to Rubik's Cube.

In Iraq, Bush (a Cold War man to his fingertips) is about to go for the Big Push, and he will be counting on the self-interest of China to assure himself that the money is there to do the job.

In New York at the same time, top earners remain obsessed with the Dow and where to invest their Christmas bonuses. Everything else (Saddam included) can go hang.