ABSTRACT
The argument that the United States is in imminent danger of falling from primacy is one of those contentions that seem to emerge every couple of decades or so. In the early 1970s, as the United States was retreating from Vietnam, struggling economically, and suffering a crisis of confidence, pundits argued that Japan and Europe were poised to replace America as the world's strongest economic power(s). In the late 1980s, Paul Kennedy spurred yet another such debate about America's place in the world with his Rise and Decline of Great Powers. Kennedy argued that the United States, suffering from rising deficits resulting from “imperial overstretch” coupled with the rise of China, Japan, and the then European Economic Community, would suffer eventual but unavoidable relative decline. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the advantage of hindsight allows us to recognize the undue alarmism that informed these earlier debates.
