ABSTRACT
When george W. bush’s controversial presidency drew to a close, dark scenarios of the United States in decline have made it back on the international agenda. Since then, talks about America’s regression, about the non-polar world or about the rise of new Asian superpowers overtaking the “West”, figure prominently in academic debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Remembrances of Paul Kennedy’s late 1980s thoughts on the “Rise and Fall of Great Powers” come up, which questioned U.S. world power status and caused a broad discussion in the last year of the Reagan administration.
