The World's Not 'Post-American' Yet

Several years ago, in the course of the great recession and the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, a wave of books depicted, dissected, and debated America's purported decline. Excellent scholars and writers, from Ikenberry to Kupchan to Kagan to Edelman to Zakaria to Friedman and Mandelbaum to Lieber to Bremmer to Brzezinski, examined America's power in the context of a rapidly changing international system. The debate was evocative of the late 1980s, when Paul Kennedy and Samuel Huntington led a similar national discussion during what should have been a geopolitically happy time, the period of Soviet glasnost and perestroika followed by the end of the Cold War, but which became a period in which America doubted its long-term competitiveness and thus its long-term ability to remain a superpower. This time, the stakes are arguably greater still. Instead of Japan and Germany worrying America about its future ability to sustain preeminence, it is a somewhat less friendly China that is providing much of the basis for concern.