The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies

by Josef Joffe

Overview

“A bracing and intelligent reminder that, for all its woes, America remains extraordinarily dynamic, innovative, and resilient.”—Fareed Zakaria

Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2013, The Myth of America’s Decline is a highly provocative look at how the United States, for all its failings, continues to be the leading business, political, and intellectual model for all other nations. In a world where America bashers constantly chortle that the United States is in decline, Josef Joffe, using lively historical examples and empirical economic models, demonstrates that these doomsday contentions are flawed, and that America—even when compared with a resurgent China—is the land where the future is being born.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871407283
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/29/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Publisher-editor of Die Zeit and the author of Überpower, Josef Joffe was educated at Swarthmore College and Harvard University. A frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, he is a founding board member of the American Interest. He is a Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures xi

Introduction: America as Has-Been xiii

Chapter 1 "It's Decline Time in America:" A Short History 1

The 1950s: The Russians Are Coming! 3

The 1960s: The "Unraveling of America" 7

The 1970s: America's "Malaise" 15

The 1980s: Japan's "Rising Sun" 20

The Twenty-First Century: The Chinese Are Coming! 33

Chapter 2 Politics and Prophecy, or the uses of Declinism 43

The Structure of Doomism 46

The Functions of Doomism 52

Why Glee, Why Doom? 60

Chapter 3 The Powers and their Power: Measuring What Matters 73

The Facts and the Figures 73

Frames vs. Films 79

What Is Power? 90

Chapter 4 Hype and History: Why Tomorrow Is Not Like Yesterday 105

The High Rollers of the Twentieth Century 105

A Tale of Tigers and Dragons 112

Chapter 5 The Next Number One: China and Yesterday's Highfliers 129

A Superstar Is Born 129

Modernitarianism: New Dragon vs. Old Tigers 139

State Capitalism 2.0 145

The Four Fault Lines of State Capitalism 2.0 156

Chapter 6 Challengers and Champions: Why America's Edge Will Endure 165

Demography and Destiny 165

Power Today and Tomorrow: Education 172

The Power of Invention 188

The Power of Immigration 195

Modernitarianism vs. the Liberal Model 206

Chapter 7 America, the West, and the Rest: Who Will Own the Twenty-First Century? 215

The World's New Power Map 215

The Lure of Liberal Empire 227

Liberal Empire Made in U.S.A. 238

America as XXL Britain 242

The Default Power 246

The Prospects of American Power 261

Acknowledgments 269

Notes 273

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

09/09/2013
Editor of Germany’s esteemed weekly Die Zeit, Joffe (Überpower) builds his latest book around the idea of the U.S. as the world’s “default power.” Joffe rebuts those doomsayers who, over the course of the last half-century, have predicted that American influence was secondary to the Soviet Union, or Japan, and now China. While Joffe’s counter-argument that indeed America is not in relative decline is persuasive on the issue of military power, he sidesteps domestic issues such as education, urban deterioration, and racial conflict. Joffe’s detailed catalogue of economic and civil weaknesses in the Chinese police state is the book’s high point, however, with the author observing that repression has been the Chinese way since the Ming Dynasty. Aggressively capitalistic and resolutely optimistic, Joffe revisits familiar conservative talking points about American vitality, private enterprise, and individual freedom. For readers tired of blame-America-first critics or who want to find out what a smart, influential European thinks of the country’s prospects, Joffe’s book is a useful place to begin. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] lively, convincing, salutary argument."

Wall Street Journal - Bret Stephens

"Josef Joffe is a brilliant observer of international politics. He is also a keen student—and admirer—of the United States. He combines these two passions in this remarkable reflection on America’s role in the world. It is the best book on the subject in years."

Fareed Zakaria

"In lucid and logical style, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals skewers the anti-Americanisms of his compatriots while telling the United States how to survive as the only superpower."

Joseph S. Nye Jr.

"German intellectual Josef Joffe makes a stirring case against the Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman’s of the world that America is strong and getting stronger…. While acknowledging that anything is possible and America’s best days may yet be behind us, Joffe is adept at explaining the intangible factors that will likely ensure America’s preeminence for ages to come."

The Daily Beast - James Kirchick

"The Myth of America’s Decline effectively lays to rest the belief that America has lost its preeminence. Joffe’s well-documented research confirms an entirely different story: that the United States stands near or at the top of every ranking used to measure a nation’s strength and vigor. It is a book that should be of interest to all who may be worried about America’s future."

Henry A. Kissinger

"Brave and bracing."

Foreign Affairs - Walter Russell Mead

2013-10-03
Think Yankee power is doomed? The answer is no, argues German magazine editor Joffe, even if the patient seems to be running a fever. America, some wag once observed, went from colony to empire without an intervening period of civilization. Even in the colonial era, observers (mostly French) were predicting that the British experiment in North America was doomed to failure. The modern strain of doomsaying, all talk of decadence and collapse, began in the 1950s, "when Decline 1.0 came to grip the land." It did not come to pass, though by Joffe's reckoning, we're in the fifth iteration (Decline 5.0) of the idea that some crisis--Sputnik, Vietnam, the dot-com collapse, the Great Recession--is finally going to put the nation out of business. Joffe considers various metrics, such as the size and extent of America's military, to argue that the nation's power in the world is not diminished. If this argument sometimes seems uncritical--not everyone believes that the nation's treasury should be devoted to war-making--it does a solid enough job of refuting the declinism so feared by the right and perhaps welcomed by some even farther to the right and left. Along the way, Joffe cites some little-discussed statistics, such as the fact that China's aging population and the need for a replenished labor pool to support it fall into "ratios [that] are far worse than any in the West." So much for China as the rising dominant world power. There is no triumphalism here, for Joffe notes that there are plenty of problems for the United States to overcome, such as "the breakdown of bipartisanship…intractable deficits and rising debt…[and] social polarization." Mostly good news, then, with some bad thrown in to balance the picture. Of interest to those with a bent for policy wonkery, geopolitics and demographic trends.

Kirkus Reviews