Jeffrey Madrick, The End of Affluence (New York: Random House, 1995).
Robert J. Samuelson, The Good Life and Its Discontents (New York: Times Books, 1995).
Odd though it now appears, less than a decade ago Americans were debating whether the United States was a declining power in world politics. Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers reached the national bestseller list. Geo-economics was alleged to be replacing geopolitics, and Japan was cast ominously as a rising giant. At the time of the Group of Seven Summit in Houston in 1990, some observers portrayed Japan and a reunited Germany as rising superpowers.
Such predictions look less impressive today. At mid-decade the German and Japanese economies languish in the doldrums: Japan has low unemployment but very little growth, while Germany has only modest growth and high unemployment. In recent years the U.S. economy has experienced 2 1/2 percent annual growth, low unemployment, low inflation, and impressive productivity gains in manufacturing that have restored the country's competitiveness in key industries.
Even more to the point, and as some observers noted during the earlier "declinism" debate, the United States is the only country that scores well in all the components of national power: military, economic, and soft power (cultural and ideological attraction). Germany and Japan are largely uni-dimensional powers with limited portfolios of instruments. Moreover, the decline of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the counterbalances to American military and soft power. Since power is relational, the poor performance of others has the effect of enhancing American power. Some commentators began referring to the 1990s as an era of American hegemony in a unipolar world. Such descriptions are misleading, however, because they fail to portray the growing complexity of domains of power.
