In The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which touched the anxieties of conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan's expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in 'imperial overstretch'. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the decline more difficult to stop. But Rise and Fall, a critic said to Kennedy at the Brookings Institution in Washington in 1988, was too conventional a book. It mistakenly supposed that the problems we faced were the problems of states, and that the solution to them, if solutions there were, were political.

LRB 13 May 1993 | PDF Download