The financial crisis is raising serious questions about the future of American power. Can the United States sustain the burdens of global leadership while we dust ourselves off from what looks like a near-knockout blow to our economy?

As Zachary Karabell has argued, we are now seeing a globalization of finance that parallels the globalization of manufacturing that began in earnest in the 1970s. Wall Street is no longer the center of the financial world as wealth flows from our shores to the Gulf and Asia's rising states. The sharp increase in the quantity and quality of consumption, which we owe to a combination of Wal-Mart (i.e., China), cheap credit, and historically low fuel prices, has bought the United States social peace in an era of stagnant wages and rising inequality.

Now, however, that grand bargain has come to a spectacular end, and it's easy to imagine Americans turning away from the world to focus exclusively on our domestic troubles.

Yet we simply can't afford to look inward. Our prosperity is so deeply enmeshed in that of the rest of the world--and particularly with the prosperity of China, which has become our economic Siamese Twin--that turning away is all but unthinkable. Just as importantly, there is no plausible successor to America as global hegemon. You might say that we are the hegemon by default. The real question isn't whether America will still be called upon to lead.

Rather, the question is: Where exactly do we intend to go? When it comes to foreign policy, conservatives have focused almost exclusively on fighting terrorists and rolling back rogue states and spreading political democracy. As a result, conservatives have tended to neglect the economic dimension of foreign policy. But we've now seen how global economic imbalances shape the strategic picture.

Consider the following nightmare scenario: Just as the next president begins a renewed push to bring peace to Afghanistan and to consolidate security gains in Iraq, he discovers that the Iranian nuclear program has advanced far further than he had hoped. Because of the Bush administration's malign neglect, which ostensibly sought to "preserve the options" of the next president, President ObaMcCain is left with only one option: to launch a ferocious military attack on the world's most fearsome rogue state.

Imagine what such an attack would do to global energy markets, and thus to the global economy. Who believes that China and Russia would be eager to lend the United States a helping hand in the wake of such an attack given that both states have eagerly worked with hydrocarbon exporters, including Iran, to restrain American power?

When Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the bestselling 1987 polemic that famously predicted the United States would follow the Roman and British and Soviet Empires into irreversible decline, he saw Japan as the world's ascendant power, a state that, like Venice and Britain before it, would use its trading might to make up for its modest size. This prediction was made shortly before Japan's so-called "Lost Decade," during which economic growth almost slowed to a half and unemployment inched steadily upwards. And of course America was on the verge of an extraordinary innovation boom, which made talk of American decline seem faintly ridiculous.

In fairness to Kennedy, he maintained that the unraveling of an empire often takes a very long time, and that there will always be false dawns. Kennedy's essential argument was that massive deficit spending was a serious sign of weakness, particularly when dedicated to a military buildup. Does this sound familiar?

The fight against Al-Qaeda has led to a vast expansion of our military budget just as the boomers retire and as years of neglect have left us with crumbling infrastructure. Tax cuts haven't been matched by spending cuts, and we've essentially been relying on Chinese largesse to stay afloat. It is a rather awkward position for a hegemon to find itself in.

So how do we get out of this mess? It's not enough to encourage a more democratic world. We also need to encourage a more middle-class world. Sherle Schwenninger and Afshin Molavi have been arguing for an economic strategy that fosters full employment and ample demand in the developing world--a kind of Keynesianism for the BRIC economies. Both Schwenninger and Molavi are on the center-left, yet the project of building a middle-class world ought to appeal to conservatives most of all, particularly social conservatives interested in encouraging stable families and fighting poverty. Unbalanced growth in the developing world has made states more unstable and bellicose--and it's also put severe pressure on family life.

Right now, China suffers from severe interregional inequalities that threaten to spiral out of control. Robust economic growth in rural regions in the 1980s has been followed by an economic policy that taxes the countryside to benefit the export-oriented big cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to a mass breakup of rural families as fathers and mothers leave home to send money back to struggling children.

By reversing this pro-urban policy, and by investing more in education and infrastructure in the interior, China would enjoy more balanced growth. A similar approach could be embraced in India, Russia, Mexico and other emerging economies. This would tackle several interrelated problems, ranging from the persistence of poverty in the developing world to the global savings glut that helped create the current financial crisis to the global labor glut that has put pressure on American workers. Americans would export more and import less while the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians would do the opposite. The end result would be a more prosperous and balanced global economy, and, as an added bonus, more bourgeois societies are likely to be less violent and more inclined to embrace liberal democracy.

And which country would be better suited to leading this bourgeois world than a reinvigorated United States?