What most declinists want is for America to stop being American and for its citizens to transform themselves into full-blown Europeans, with a socialist economy, a pacifist foreign policy and the rest. In other words, the US should recognise itself as a botched enterprise and come home, spiritually speaking, to what the former Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld called "old Europe"
Describing the European attitude to America as neurotic,George Walden writing in Standpoint magazine says that we European's
seem unable to get a cool, factual grip on the country, one that is free of fashion, inchoate historical resentments or delusions of superiority.
Today's anti Americanism he feels makes no sense at all and
The attempt to write off democracy in America, one of the greatest achievements of humankind (what other country is capable of mounting an election campaign like the one we have just witnessed?) as a self-evident failure, in contrast to the vibrant new protectionist Europe to come, and to obliterate American successes in science and technology, could be dismissed as so extreme as to be irrelevant to the debate.
However his main point is that if America is no longer the leader of the free world,who else can take the mantle? and
If it is to be a multipolar world, who, beyond Europe, would form these poles? India, Japan, Russia, China, the Middle East, South America,
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