Denying “America’s Decline”
259crisis as the real beginning of “America’s decline.” The NIC has asserted
that the US will still remain powerful until 2025, but will be much weaker
in its control of the world, and in 2027, China’s economy will surpass the
US. There is even a new book written by an English writer and published
with the title, “When China Rules the World: the End of the Western
World and the Birth of a New Global Order.”^7 Some western observers are
even worried that Europe’s financial problems (e.g. the debt crisis) will
bring a second decline to America and the world economy. Besides,
America’s politics are still deadlocked over the federal budget. In this
case, many people assume that the US will decline gradually, while China
is rising.
Quite a lot of people believe that the US is just like Rome and Britain,
and will follow the latter, falling into the “power fading fatalism” cycle. In
his speech “Will America Decline?” at the ASH center of the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University, Nye pointed out seriously
that it is not easy to define which period of “life cycle” America is in, and
it is too early to assert that the US has declined. According to the history,
when America ended its “independence war,” people lamented that Britain
had declined; but the fact is that it was one hundred years after America’s
“independence war” that the Empire’s prosperity came.
Even if one admits the decline is happening, on the basis of historical
research, it’s hard to define the timing of it. The process of a power’s
decline may be slow, rather than what Nye’s colleague, Professor Niall
Ferguson, said–that the US will decline rapidly. In history, it took at least
half a century before the decline of Britain’s hegemony.^8
Nye demonstrates the slow processes of powers’ declines with history.
He maintains that the fathers of America worried a great deal that the US
would follow Rome. 150 years ago, Charles John Huffam Dickens once
said that if everyone held the belief that America would be poor and stand
still, full of crises, then America would develop just as they assumed.
Current opinion polls suggest that many Americans believe the decline of
the US will come soon. Four maps on the wall of the colloseum in Rome
depict the process of Rome’s expansion and decline–from a small town to
a super empire that crossed three continents (Europe, Asia and Africa), and
then to a city, which makes people sigh unceasingly with regret. However,
in the three hundred years after reaching its summit, Rome still governed
the world. Moreover, its destruction was due to in-fighting–it was
frequently weakened by disputes among the barbarian tribes, rather than
(^7) http://www.rmlt.com.cn/News/201012/201012101033552615_2.html
(^8) http://zhangming1977.blog.sohu.com/203824293.html