Face It: U.S. Power Is Waning

With the US election just four months away, the American political and media class is focusing on mundane issues such as debt, jobs and taxes. But among the foreign policy elite the really big problem facing Americans is how their nation is going to keep its flattering but onerous title of No. 1. As the distinguished left-liberal columnist E. J. Dionne has argued: ''American decline is the spectre haunting our politics.'' Both presidential candidates insist that their goal is to ensure US pre-eminence in the world.