THE “America is in decline” crowd is at it again. You remember them: clutching copies of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, they claimed that America was the victim of “imperial overstretch” and would soon collapse under the weight of its worldwide commitments, following Spain, Britain, and other former great powers into the dustbin of history.
No such luck. Instead, the USSR unraveled and America proved in Iraq its singular ability to project power on a global scale, albeit using a form of shared-burden financing that didn’t occur to Philip II or Queen Victoria.
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