Robert W. Merry: Understanding America's Fall

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Robert Kagan has produced a fascinating cover piece in the February 2 New Republic entitled, "Not Fade Away: Against the myth of American decline." It’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book entitled The World America Made, due out soon from Knopf. Kagan specializes in diminutive volumes, with small pages and few of them, that pack tight, provocative arguments. A previous such book was Of Paradise and Power, which compared the United States as Mars with Europe’s Venus. It was a huge success. Now he marshals his analytical and writing skills on behalf of the argument that rumors of American decline are vastly exaggerated.

He makes a compelling case, and Kagan’s foray into the breach could serve as a bit of a corrective to much of what’s being written today under the voguish consensus that America is roughly equivalent to Great Britain circa 1910. It would be a positive development if Kagan’s essay brought forth a bit more rigor from some of those positing the consensus argument of decline.

But Kagan’s essay doesn’t say much about what kind of foreign policy America should pursue in its next decades of lingering global dominance. And, whatever merit one sees in his analytical framework, it certainly doesn’t serve as a blueprint for the kind of foreign policy that the neoconservative Kagan has been championing since the end of the Cold War. One could almost suggest that Kagan has a vested interest in American global power since he always displays such abandon in advocating its use...