Freedom is a value, something I very much want. It is not a virtue. Freedom does not make me good any more than it makes me bad. Responsibility is a virtue, a behavior that makes me good. When a culture puts freedom before responsibility, it has sown the seeds of its own destruction, which seems inevitably to follow.
History is replete with examples of cultures that rose to world dominance.
None of them stayed there. They all declined from within as they turned away from the virtue that brought them to the heights to indolence and corruption. When the Berlin wall came down we were clearly the dominant culture in the world. The United States is in historical virgin territory. No previous culture has remained dominant throughout the history of the world.