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Networked Blogs
Feb
5
Rebutting Declinism
Filed Under declinism, Election 2008, foreign policy
It’s an election year and sooner or later we will hear how America is in a tailspin and only one candidate will be able to save our great country from imminent decline and demise.
Opines Brett Stephens:
Declinism is again in vogue. “America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order,” writes Parag Khanna in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story titled, cheerfully, “Who Shrank the Superpower?” In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Fred Kaplan observes that “the United States can no longer take obeisance for granted.” Mr. Kaplan’s new book, “Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power,” sounds just a bit derivative of Nancy Soderberg’s “The Superpower Myth” (2005), Roger Burbach’s “Imperial Overstretch” (2004) and Charles Kupchan’s “The End of the American Era” (2003).
American “decline” is the foreign-policy equivalent of homelessness: The media only take note of it when a Republican is in the White House. Broadly speaking, declinists divide between those who merely accept America’s supposed diminishment as a fact of life, and those who celebrate it as long overdue.
Stephens says that America is still influencing world events and pro-American leaders have risen to power, while anti-Americans have lost. The U.S. economy continues to grow and despite years of the Iraq War, the percentage of GDP spent on the military is only 4%. We’re still in good shape economically, despite the current market corrections.
In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, nearly every government that joined President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” — Australia, Great Britain, Denmark and Japan — was returned to power. France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, the war’s two most vocal opponents, were cashiered for two candidates who campaigned explicitly on a pro-American agenda. The same happened in South Korea, where the unapologetically anti-American President Roh Moo-hyun has been replaced by the unapologetically pro-American Lee Myung-bak. Italy’s equally unapologetic pro-American Silvio Berlusconi seems set to return to office after a brief holiday.
Bruno Behrend has a rebuttal to those who say America’s great days are over.
Rumors and predictions of our death are greatly exaggerated. This is not to say we can coast. That is never an option. Just do your part to make the world a better place.
