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Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, said President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It was a “rah-rah America!” applause line for a president who needed to get the assembled Republicans out of their seats a few times over the course of the evening. But the line works literally, too. Whenever someone tells me that the U.S. is in decline, I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. And neither, I tend to think, do they.