Goin' down

"Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it?" asks Slate's Fred Kaplan in an article noting the central conclusions of the NIC's 2020 report, namely that India and China will rise to challenge US global dominance in the next 15 years.

Michael Lind, on the other hand, says the US is already on the way down. He observes in the Financial Times that "evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere," and goes on to conclude:

Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence. To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did during and after the second world war.

But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive statesmen like Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being "present at the creation." The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This time, the US is absent at the creation.

In the meantime, somebody should start passing around some Joseph Nye for the plebes in the State Department to start reading.

Update: Lots of stuff along similar lines to the pieces above, here.