American Declinism

This article is written by a man named Josef Joffe, who, amongst other things, is a co-editor of Die Zeit - a popular German weekly newspaper.

He argues here that America is, in fact, not declining - or at least nowhere near as dramatically as is often made out. Joffe suggests that "it is decline time in the United States" "every ten years." And so far, at the end of each cycle, America remains "first on any scale of power that matters." While he accepts that "the breathtaking rise of China is at the center of contemporary worries," he thinks that their rise in power has only started so vastly in very recent years, and that there is no way for it to be sustainable for them.

In this article, he makes a very bold suggestion as to one of the reasons that the United States will always be in "a league of it's own," and this is that America is the only country in the world with both the will, and the means to "intervene anywhere on the planet." Joffe thinks that America, like Europe once was, "is a warrior culture," and it is this that allows them to be the "default power, the country that occupies center stage."