America as an idea
James Fallows
American power is declining as Barack Obama begins his presidency. American power has been declining through the entirety of my conscious life.
The first presidential election I remember with any clarity was in 1960. Part of the argument John F. Kennedy made against Richard Nixon and the record of the Eisenhower years was that a “prestige gap” had left the United States at a disadvantage relative to the Soviet Union, not to mention the alleged dangers of a missile gap. By the late 1960s, the United States was suffering its first-ever military defeat and was estranged from many of its allies because of the Johnson-Nixon policies in Vietnam, not to mention being torn apart by the worst domestic disturbances in more than a century. By the mid 1970s, it had been forced off the gold standard and had endured its first presidential resignation and its first peacetime rationing and price controls with the arrival of OPEC and its “oil shocks”.




