That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

• Author: Kanat, Kilic Bugra
• Position: 'Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety' and 'The Short American Century: A Postmortem' - Book review

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011, 400 pages; ISBN 0374288909.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety

By Gideon Rachman

New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011, 352 pages; ISBN 1439176620.

The Short American Century: A Postmortem

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2012, 296 pages; ISBN 0674064453.

THE SUBJECT of American decline and the new global order has been on the agenda of political scientists and international observers for more than two decades. Even before the end of the Cold War, in 1989 Paul Kennedy in his seminal book on The Rise and Fall of Great Powers pointed to "imperial overstretch" and the national debt caused by increasing military expenditures as the major causes of the US's decline in the coming decade. (1) The US victory in the Cold War and the fall of communism in the world somewhat postponed these concerns and Kennedy's predictions were overshadowed by the moment of unipolarity in world politics, in which the United States enjoyed unchallengeable military and political dominance. However, starting from the late 1990s, concerns grew about the future of the United States' dominance in world politics as the Chinese economy's growth accelerated.

With the political and economic developments in the first few years of new millennium the debate about the US's decline and its possible consequences on the international order started to be studied more systematically. In its initial phase, the debate on the American decline revolved around the major questions that arose from the US military conundrums in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis and recession. Later different responds and contributions to this debate created several schools of thought whose approaches in this debate differ fundamentally from one another. These differences ranged from divergence of opinions about the existence of a decline, its diagnosis, the solutions as well as the domestic and global consequences of this decline. In recent years, proponents of each viewpoint have contributed to this debate by publishing important studies supporting their arguments. In the remaining part of this paper, the major works that were written in the last couple of years will be analyzed and discussed.

What Happened to the US?

One of the major parts of the debate on American decline is regarding the diagnosis of the downward spiral that is taking place. The question "what happened to us?" has become the most common one in this debate. The observers in this field have tried to answer this question by focusing on developments in domestic or foreign policies of the United States since the end of the Cold War to trace the process of decline. For some the cause of the decline was mostly external as result of global transformation and the rise of some other powers in international system, whereas for others the reasons that prepared the ground for the US's decline was mostly domestic economic and political problems.

For Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, as for all other scholars, the 1990s were the golden years for US power and influence in the international system. The end of the Cold War with the triumph of the US created a "new world order" in which it had acquired worldwide political supremacy and economic power. The Gulf War and the swift victory of the American-led coalition also ended the Vietnam syndrome, which had damaged US self-confidence since the US withdrawal from Southeast Asia. This created a new era of optimism in which many believed that the liberal democratic order would become the norm for other powers. Fukuyama declared the end of history in 1992, whereas democratic...