We're No. 1 (and We're Going to Stay That Way) Why the prophets of American decline are wrong.

The Financial Post ^ | July 3, 2014 | Tom Donilon

[2ndDivisionVet]

"The United States cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half.... [O]nly self-delusion can keep us from admitting our decline to ourselves."

-Henry Kissinger, 1961

For all our optimism, Americans have always worried about our place in the world. It's in our DNA, and it helps drive our renewal. To borrow from the great political scientist Samuel Huntington, "[T]he United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline. The declinists play an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting."

When Kissinger wrote the above words in 1961, he did have some valid concerns. At the time, the U.S. economy was struggling to grow its way out of a recession. The Soviet Union had launched the world's first artificial satellite, known as Sputnik, into orbit. The nation went into a panic, thinking we had fallen behind in technological innovation and would soon be outspent and outmatched by Moscow.

And yet the decade and a half that was the subject of Kissinger's fears -- the period from the end of World War II until John F. Kennedy's administration -- is now seen by most historians as an era of unparalleled American economic growth and power. The decade that followed was even more prosperous, ending with the United States, not the Soviet Union, making the first lunar landing. And a mere 30 years after Kissinger wrote those words, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist entirely.

Every 10 years or so, a new bout of profound pessimism has swept the nation. In his fine book, The Myth of America's Decline, the German journalist and author Josef Joffe documents these periodic waves of declinism....

[FredZarguna]

As long as they stay in their own little playpen, I have no doubt they’ll be quite efficient at killing themselves, and we’ll make tons of money selling them guns.