The Default Power : The False Prophecy of America's Decline
Joffe, Josef
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2009, v88, #5, pp2-20
"Every ten years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950s, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the "missile gap" trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sounded the dirge over bipolarity, predicting a world of five, rather than two, global powers. At the end of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech invoked "a crisis of confidence" that struck "at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." Since the United States first became a global superpower, it has been fashionable to speak of its decline. But in today's world, the United States' economic and military strength, along with the attractiveness of its ideals, will ensure its power for a long time to come.
Josef Joffe is Co-Editor of Die Zeit, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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A49/04-09. Posted August 27, 2009
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