Foreign Affairs.
Playing a dominant role in world politics does not make for an easy
life. Even very powerful states encounter problems they cannot solve and
situations they would prefer to avoid. But as Macbeth remarks after
seeing the witches, "Present fears are less than horrible imaginings."
What really scares American foreign policy commentators is not any
immediate frustration or danger but the prospect of longer-term decline.
Recently, the United States has been going through yet another bout
of declinism -- the fifth wave in the last six decades, by the scholar
Josef Joffe's count. This one has been caused by the juxtaposition of
China's rising power and American economic, political, and military
malaise. Just as in the past, however, the surge of pessimism has
produced a countersurge of defensive optimism, with arguments put
forward about the continued value and feasibility of U.S. global
leadership.
Two examples of such antideclinist forays are Robert Kagan's The World America Made and Robert Lieber's Power and Willpower in the American Future.
Both make some cogent points in their analyses of the past, present,
and future of the existing U.S.-sponsored global order. But their
authors' refusal to accord due weight to multilateral institutions and
material power in their assessments of that order, and their
overconfidence in making assertions about the future, reduce the books'
value as appraisals of contemporary world politics.
