Smacking down "declinism"
July 29, 2008
Robert J. Lieber, professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown, notes a pattern:
Over the years, America’s staying power has been regularly and chronically underestimated—by condescending French and British statesmen in the nineteenth century, by German, Japanese, and Soviet militarists in the twentieth, and by homegrown prophets of doom today. The critiques come and go. The object of their contempt never does.