To the Editor:

Re “The Fleecing of America,” by Roger Cohen (column, The New York Times on the Web, Sept. 22):

For those who still refer to history, it seems to me that in the 20th century, the United States was Rome to Britain’s Athens.

In this century, it looks as if the United States will be Athens to China’s Rome.

What I see in all this is that these developments were inescapable and will be so again. There was nothing Athens (or Britain) could have done to avert the turning of the tide. It was demographic, technological and cultural.

Our culture is now so fraught with divisions between the fundamentalist antigovernment voters and the social-minded ones that this country appears to be veering far from our mission as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It was once said that when the United States catches a cold, the rest of the world sneezes. Those days are rapidly disappearing, and our leaders’ task in the future will be to make the best of it, with the humility to see that we are but one nation among others.