Americans have long bragged that we are the world's most advanced nation. We certainly used to be. But those leading earlier in a race do not always end up winning it.

During the Cold War, countries that were not part of the "Free World" or the Communist bloc ("second world") were often called "third world." Many of these countries being very poor, "third world" came to refer to underdeveloped countries.

Several countries from the second and third worlds have become much more advanced since the Cold War ended, and China has become an economic and technological powerhouse.

But the opposite change can also happen. Could the U.S. fall so far behind that it becomes a third-world country?

We are already way behind in railroad systems. High-speed passenger trains in China, Japan and Europe operate at 200 to 280 mph. Even in Russia, trains connecting Moscow with Saint Petersburg run at 120 to 140 mph. By contrast, Amtrak trains — with the exception of the Acelas between Boston and Washington, D.C. — are limited to 79 miles per hour.

One reason for this situation may be our difficulty in building major new projects , thanks largely to the opportunities mandatory environmental impact studies give to project opponents.

I can understand (while not agreeing with) columnist Thomas Friedman's comment that he sometimes wishes we could be "China for one day." In China, not a democracy, when the government decides to do something it gets done.

By contrast, our federal government has great difficulty deciding what to do, and then faces monumental impediments doing it. Conflict between Senate and House, between Congress and the president, and between the courts and the other branches, make policy decisions difficult. Interest groups harmed by a decision can delay implementation by legislative and judicial actions at the state and local levels.

Although our federal government is big and spends a lot of money, it is basically a weak government, and one thing that third-world countries have had in common has been weak governments.

Not all strong governments are good governments, but all good governments are probably strong ones.

A notable example of a weak political system is Haiti. Its government cannot protect its citizens from the gangs that control much of the country, terrorizing and killing large numbers of people. Haiti is the very model of a Hobbesian anarchy where life is "nasty, brutish, and short."

We are still far from being a Haiti. But the drafters of our original Constitution may have overdone putting limits on federal power.

Constitutional amendments after the Civil War strengthened the federal government. But in recent decades economic interests —basically large corporations — have sought to weaken the government's ability to regulate them, arguing falsely that the federal bureaucracy is out of control.

In fact, the federal bureaucracies have always been strongly controlled by Congress, especially since enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.

Remember that corporations have long since gotten too big for the individual states to regulate. They could simply threaten to pull out of any state, along with the employment opportunities they wield, services they provide, and taxes they pay, if that state clamped down on them.

Federal regulations — which apply to the whole country — were the only alternative to no effective regulation at all.

Americans depend on federal regulations to protect us from disease, bad food, and environmental problems. The federal government protects the safety of air travel and defends us from foreign enemies.

It has financed a great deal of basic scientific and technical research, leading to atomic power, radar, jet engines, computers, and the internet, providing the basis for continuing prosperity.

Other countries (like China) are now spending a great deal more on basic research than we are doing, and they are getting results. Short-sighted cutbacks in federal programs could produce a future U.S. that is literally a third-world country technologically as well as politically.

Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.