I think I would have to say cultural blindness and to a degree, isolationism.
There seems to be a fairly large contingent here that has absolutely no concept of life outside of the United States. The things they see on the television news that they decry as horrors are actually things they need to realize may be perfectly acceptable in the context of the society they exist within. Sadly, we seem to be pushing toward a goal of being "saviors" of these societies, but not educating ourselves or our children in the least about the fact that what we may find distasteful is what is revered by others.
We also will sometime in the future start seeing more problems economically, especially in terms of China and import/export trade. China's economy is developing at a fast rate, and the country is producing a number of engineers and scientists, while we lean more toward service industries. For now academically we will continue to hold the upper hand, simply due to the tradition of education in China, which doesn't favor research and independant though and tends more toward digesting as much known information as possible. In the future, with China's economic growth and production of high-tech workers, we will begin to lose ground.
I guess in a nutshell, we've been a superpower long enough to let ourselves become blinded to the fact that the rest of the world continues operating and growing, while we focus too narrowly on ourselves.
