As a life-long hypochondriac, I was laughing out loud when reading the tragic-comic inscription on the tombstone located in the cemetery in Key West, Florida: 'I Told You I Was Sick!'
I could imagine the poor guy confronting family and friends and insisting to no avail that what he had was more than just the common cold or the seasonal flu.
'You are not sick,' is the kind of reassuring message that Robert Kagan is sending to the nation's foreign policy hypochondriacs aka 'declinists' in his new non-fiction book The World America Made, contending that America is in tip-top military and economic health and ready to take care of the rest of the world. He recalls that the same kind of hypochondriacs had complained that America was really, really in decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
But, as the sad case of our late Key Westerner demonstrates, even hypochondriacs do get sick. In the same way, great powers do decline, both in relative and absolute terms. Hence American global economic power started to decline relative to rising economic players like Japan and Germany in the post-1945 era, and relative to China and India more recently.
And while in absolute terms the US continues to maintain the largest economy - and remains the pre-eminent military superpower based on any standard one applies - it still has to operate by the realist axiom that in the long run, no great power can preserve its military superiority on the basis of a weakening economic superstructure.
Kagan, the son of a renowned historian who had studied the Peloponnesian War and the brother of the author of a book on the Napoleonic Wars, likes to present himself as a hard-core Realpolitik analyst of foreign policy, and tends to bash his intellectual rivals, the so-called 'declinists' as idealists. He says they place their faith in the dreamy notions of an evolving international community and the abolition of war through peaceful diplomacy and international law.
Not unlike your average hypochondriac who dismisses the advice of the medical doctor, these declinists refuse apparently to face reality and listen to a rational scientist of power like Kagan, and instead assume that the US interests and values would continue to prosper in the more multipolar system in the kind of post-American world that commentator Fareed Zakaria imagined in his book on the same subject.
His views matter now as he is a top foreign adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
