The Huffington Post: Is the American Century Over?

Charles Dickens wrote that the Americans always think they are in “an alarming crisis.” After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we believed we were in decline. When Japan’s manufacturing outstripped ours in the 1980s, we thought the Japanese were ten feet tall. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans mistakenly thought that China was about to overtake the United States.

The result is a foreign policy debate that is often divorced from reality. The Middle East is in turmoil and American influence in that region has diminished. But the causes are the revolutions in the Middle East, not American decline. It is a mistake to generalize from the Middle East to the rest of the world. [...]

The distinguished British strategist Lawrence Freedman notes that among the features that distinguish the U.S. from “the dominant great powers of the past: American power is based on alliances rather than colonies.” Alliances are assets; colonies are liabilities. [...]

A key question for American foreign policy is how to bolster institutions, create networks and establish policies for dealing with the new transnational issues we will confront in this century. Leadership by the largest country is important for the production of global public goods, but domestic political gridlock often blocks such leadership.

read the article