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America's Place in the Changing World

This study will argue that America is indeed declining, but not nearly as much as Edward N. Luttwak argues in his essay "Is America on the Way Down?" On the other hand, Robert L. Bartley offers an extreme and inaccurately optimistic appraisal of America's future prospects in his essay with the same title as Luttwak's. The two authors offer extreme views which must be ultimately rejected in order to arrive at a more moderate and realistic perspective on America's place in a changing world. America is far from being the dominant nation it once was, but this fact is not a negative one, but will rather allow the nation to play a more reasonable role in a world of greater global interdependence.

There is no doubt that Luttwak is correct in assessing the historical roots of the changes in America economically, but he then offers an extreme conclusion which ignores the fact that the rest of the world is subject to the same changes at work on the United States for the past twenty or more years. Luttwak writes, for example, that "In 1970, Americans were two-and-a-half times as productive as the Japanese. . . . By 1980, the pattern of decline has already set in" (Luttwak, 1995, 353).

What Luttwak ignores is the fact that the dominance of the United States in economic terms could simply not remain as great as it was in the decades after World War II. The United States was, after all, the only powerful nation in the world which was not tremendously devastated by the war. All the great powers---Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan---went through a period of reconstruction which inevitably put the United States at the top of the heap economically. Luttwak sounds as if he expected this situation to continue indefinitely. The fact that Germany and Japan did not have to spend much on their military meant immediately that the gap between those nations and the United States economically would close over the years. This is an obvious fac...

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America's Place in the Changing World. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:45, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702696.html