Bet on America

Conservatives eagerly join the declinist party: They warn that we're going soft, that we're too liberal and squeamish and infertile and easy on illegal immigrants. The jacket copy of columnist Mark Steyn's book "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" states that "the West -- wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion -- is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization."

Nativists, meanwhile, point to illegal immigration as the equivalent of the lead in Rome's pipes. Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman and presidential candidate, said at a debate in June that immigration calls into question "whether or not we will actually survive as a nation."

I get the sense that even the most even-keeled observers are so disillusioned by Iraq, official sleaze, corporate greed, fiscal madness and so on that they fear the whole American enterprise is fundamentally diseased. Ask your friends which country will be most dominant in 50 years, and you'll be unlikely to hear anyone say "the United States."

It's probably adaptive to plan for the worst. Humans evolved in places where the most complacent and serene members of the tribe quickly became lion chow. But many Americans may simply not see clearly the extent of our current geopolitical power. It's a side effect of our solipsism. We're not terribly engaged with the rest of the world, don't tend to speak a second or third language and famously can't find Iraq on a map.

Moreover, to even address America's "full spectrum dominance" may strike some folks as gauche. Isn't it impolite to point out, as the conservative columnist Max Boot has, that our country has nine Nimitz-class aircraft supercarriers and no other country has even one? To discuss American power is to run the risk of being "triumphalist." Neoconservatives have made this whole topic rather toxic. For some people, there's a linear progression from believing in the United States as a dominant power to arguing that we should use that power unilaterally to spread democracy in distant lands where persuasion might require, just for starters, carpet bombing.

The neocon notion of Pax Americana is built around the idea that, hell yes, we're a butt-kickin' empire, and we ought to act like one. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made a striking speech in 2004 sketching America's rise as the sole superpower: "We got here because of Europe's suicide in the world wars of the 20th century, and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep. Leaving us with global dominion."

Yeah: But how has global dominion been treatin' ya lately?

The bible of the America-in-decline camp is Paul Kennedy's 1987 bestseller "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." Kennedy contended that empires invariably overreach and cannot sustain themselves as military expenditures cripple their economies. Our goal should be to manage the relative erosion of our power so that it happens slowly and smoothly, he argued.

We know what happened next: The Cold War ended, and the United States became the only superpower. Still, with our recent problems, Kennedy is back in fashion. "These days, Kennedy is looking less like a heretic and more like a prophet," wrote Paul Starobin last year in the National Journal.

But if global power is measured by military might, no other country is within light years of America. Our military expenditures, according to Cullen Murphy, are about equal to the defense expenditures of the next 15 nations combined.

North Korea spends approximately $5 billion a year on its military. That is what the Pentagon leaves as a tip for a waiter. That's what we spend on condiments! That's our ketchup and mustard budget!

The gross domestic product of the United States for 2007 probably will be in the vicinity of $13.2 trillion. China is right around $2.6 trillion -- in fourth place, after the United States, Japan and Germany.