Decline Is a Choice

The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.

by Charles Krauthammer

10/19/2009, Volume 015, Issue 05

On the other side of this debate are a few–notably Josef Joffe in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs–who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. They note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China (and perhaps India) are just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-François Revel’s How Democracies Perish. The anti-declinists point out, for example, that the fear of China is overblown. It’s based on the implausible assumption of indefinite, uninterrupted growth; ignores accumulating externalities like pollution (which can be ignored when growth starts from a very low baseline, but ends up making growth increasingly, chokingly difficult); and overlooks the unavoidable consequences of the one-child policy, which guarantees that China will get old before it gets rich.

And just as the rise of China is a straight-line projection of current economic trends, American decline is a straight-line projection of the fearful, pessimistic mood of a country war-weary and in the grip of a severe recession.

Among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands.

via Decline Is a Choice.

Guest Comment:
Larry Hall permalink

Well, it seems to me that Obama is promoting what Charles calls decline. That is the key difference between this President and, let’s say, Bill Clinton. Although Clinton was quite foolish in his policies towards the Mideast, China, etc., he still had a notion of protecting the nation’s interests.

This is the first time – at least since Carter and far more exaggerated than the Carter regime – in which a President actively seeks to reduce or eliminate American power. For all the conspiracy talk about how Bush and Clinton were one-worlders, Obama is an open one-worlder who seeks an amalgam of liberal-socialist-Marxist systems with ‘moderate’ Islam, or all Islam that is not al Qaeda. His heart is in the East, as he made clear in his tour of Europe and the Islamic world, skipping over Israel. He ’shows the soles of his shoes’ to Israel, as in a photo of him talking to Bibi, which some say was deliberate Islamic symbolism. Even if not, he has declared that Egyptian human rights abuses are no business of the US, and that American policy since 911 was a mistake, a knee-jerk reaction based on prejudice against Muslims. Obama appeases Putin, jerks the missiles from Eastern Europe, distances himself from Britain, and treats Israel pretty much the way it’s treated on college campuses with a large number of jihad-supporting Muslim students and ’students.’

Bill Clinton at least had a notion of American strategic interests, and could at least think about a Chinese strategic threat – even if he did not effectively act against it. The concept that a majority or plurality of American voters could contemplate Barack Hussein Obama as a national leader is beyond any rational analysis.


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