THE MYTH OF AMERICA'S DECLINE

Josef Joffe’s provocative and contrarian The Myth of American Decline, challenges the pervasive notion that America is on the decline.

America-bashing predates even America itself, with French Enlightenment philosophes claiming that the colony was doomed, and one critic reporting that the colony’s population was “astonishingly idiotic [and] enervated.” As the U.S. became a superpower after WWII, a more virulent, politically-charged form of declinism emerged in the 1950s, amid hysteria that “the Russians are coming.” Later, it was followed by the European miracle, Japan’s “Rising Sun,” and most recently, the looming Chinese behemoth. While declinism may be catnip for the media and for gloating Europeans eager to play up America’s “has-been” status, the actual facts do not corroborate the contentions, demonstrates Josef Joffe, a leading German commentator and American academic, in this revisionist history of American declinism from the age of Sputnik to Obama. The result is a highly provocative examination of how the United States, for all its failings, continues today to be an unending force of rejuvenation. The author of Überpower, Josef Joffe is the Editor of Die Zeit. Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute and Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford, where he teaches, he lives in Hamburg, Germany.