Is America in decline? Actually, yeah

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of America’s shortening shadow, too. The EastWest Institute, my current employer, holds a Worldwide Security Conference in Brussels every winter. In 2009, almost every session was dominated by speculation about what the Obama administration would do. This year, discussions on major topics like Afghanistan and cybersecurity included mentions of the United States, of course, but frequently the focus was on regional players with little reference to Washington at all. The group seemed simply to understand that Obama is too preoccupied with domestic problems to deliver on his earlier promises of intensive international engagement.

There’s even something in the air. Malcolm Beith, a former NEWSWEEK colleague who holds dual British and American citizenship, dropped in on me recently. After a long stint in New York, he spent the last couple of years in Mexico City as the editor of a local English-language newspaper. “New York reminds me much more of London now,” he observed. “It seems humbled.” Humbled by the financial crisis and, perhaps, and by the sense that it no longer is quite as much the center of the universe as most New Yorkers like to imagine. Despite all the talk of Obama’s popularity abroad, a new Democracy Corps–Third Way poll shows that 51 percent of Americans believe their country’s standing in the world has declined during his brief presidency…

Yet the key word here is “relative”—as in relative to whom. One American Sinologist recently returned from a conference in Beijing where the Chinese participants discussed the theories about U.S. decline. “The Chinese said, yes, the United States is in decline as compared to China, but not in relation to the EU. And certainly not in relation to Russia, which is in a much steeper decline,” he reported.