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 gre

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e second decade of the next century (Luttwak, 1995, 352). What Luttwak longs for is an American-dominated world in which the United States calls the shots. This is no longer reality. Luttwak is blinded by a romantic nostalgia. Whether Luttwak likes it or not, the United States is simply going to have to live in a world of nations more and more interdependent. The fact that the United States is going to have to learn to compromise and cooperate more, instead of bully and coerce, is one which Luttwak will have to accept. It is very likely, for example, that the bullying of Japan by Clinton will not bear the fruit many hope it will bear. It is more likely that the two nations---in conjunction with other nations---will reach a compromise agreement. Bartley, however, adopts an opposite extreme which is no more realistic than that of Luttwak. Bartley writes that "to people who use their eyes and ears it is obvious that American influence in the world is on the rise" (Bartley, 1995, 362). These words were apparently written in 1992, perhaps in the overly optimistic days after the American-led blasting of Iraq in the Persian War. If this is the fact, we have seen that the national afterglow from that military/patriotic orgasm was short

Category: Economics - A