ABSTRACT
The ColdWar is over and Americans are trying to understand their place in a world without a defining Soviet threat. Polls report that nearly half the public believes the country is in decline, and that those who believe in decline tend to favor protectionism and to counsel withdrawal from what they consider “overextended international commitments.” In a world of growing interdependence, such advice is counterproductive and
could bring on the decline it is supposed to avert; for if the most powerful country fails to lead, the consequences for international stability could be disastrous. Throughout history, anxiety about decline and shifting balances of power has been accompanied by tension and miscalculation. Now that Soviet power is declining and Japanese power rising, misleading theories of American decline and inappropriate analogies between the United States and Great Britain in the late nineteenth century have diverted our attention away from the real issue – how power is changing in world politics. The United States is certainly less powerful at the end of the twentieth century
than it was in 1945. Even conservative estimates show that the U.S. share of global product has declined frommore than a third of the total afterWorldWar II to a little more than a fifth in the 1980s. That change, however, reflects the artificial effect of World War II: Unlike the other great powers, the United States was strengthened by the war. But that artificial preponderance was bound to erode as other countries regained their economic health. The important fact is that the U.S. economy’s share of the global product has been relatively constant for the past decade and a half. The Council on Competitiveness finds that the U.S. share of world product has averaged 23 per cent each year since the mid-1970s. The CIA, using numbers that reflect the purchasing power of different currencies, reports that the American share of world product increased slightly from 25 per cent in 1975 to 26 per cent in 1988. These studies suggest that the effect of World War II lasted about a quar-
ter century and that most of the decline worked its way through the system by the mid-1970s. In fact, the big adjustment of American commitments occurred with then President Richard Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the convertibility of the dollar into gold.
