El Ocaso de los Estados Unidos

Hace varios años que se habla de la decadencia de EEUU y se hacen comparaciones con el Imperio Británico y Roma.

Este es el punto de vista de Victor Davis Hanson, que considera que es un poco prematuro hablar de declinación u ocaso de los EEUU:

For more than a century, European intellectuals have predicted the decline of the United States. The German philosophers Hegel, Nietzsche and Spengler saw Western democracy and capitalism as pernicious — the unfortunate wages of a classical civilization that had lavished upon natural man too much wealth and indulgence.

Later the Nazis bragged that they were descendants of untainted Germanic tribes of old, and promised that poorly disciplined American ``cowboys'' wouldn't stand a chance against their Panzers.

The Japanese militarists claimed that their ultra-nationalist Bushido code would give them an edge over the “decadent” GIs.

During the Cold War, hard-core socialists pontificated that the (soon-to-collapse) Soviet Union was ascendant, inasmuch as it had realized Karl Marx's triumphant New Man who was reborn from the ashes of capitalism.

In President Jimmy Carter's days of “national malaise,” the state-subsidized industries of Japan Inc. were supposedly making us all wage slaves to Sony and Toyota — until the Asian financial meltdown.

Now a new generation of pessimists is warning that it is the turn of the European Union, flush with trade surpluses, a small defense budget and a strong euro. Larger in size than us, with a greater population, a better-educated youth and a supposedly more humane social net, will Europe gradually nudge the United States from its world pre-eminence? Or does the new Asian axis of 2 billion in China and India instead foretell American decline?