Is America in decline? Should the United States continue to play the role of global leader, or focus its energies on solving its own problems?
In The World America Made, Robert Kagan paints a vivid, alarming picture of what the world would look like if America were to truly decline in influence. Kagan foresees the return of competition between established great powers and even war between such rising powers as China and India; the decline of democracy around the world as Putin's Russia and authoritarian China gain more clout; and the decline of the global free market economy, which the United States created and has supported for over sixty years.
As Kagan notes, we've seen it before, in the breakdown of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the European order in World War I, and he warns that America need not and dare not decline by committing preemptive superpower suicide.
