Sixty-one years ago, a perceptive ambassador to the US and UN from Lebanon, Charles Malik, told an American college audience: 'The challenges confronting the Western world are basically three: the challenge of communism, the challenge of the rising East, and the challenge of the internal forces of decay.'
In the ensuing years, the first challenge was met and communism defeated. The Soviet Union is no more, China has shucked communism in favour of what one wag called 'market-Leninism', and North Korea is coming apart at the seams.
The Rising East, in the eyes of some Asia hands, should now be called the Risen East. Japan led the way and was followed by the Four Tigers: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Today, China and India have started moving to the fore, with several Southeast Asian nations in their wake.
Now to the West comes the menace of the internal forces of decay. Europe, save for Germany, seems unable to pull itself together either economically or politically. And America, says a widening corps of US and Asian pundits, has slipped onto a declining slope.
Of the political, economic, diplomatic, military and social elements of national power, the evidence of US decline is abundant. At the same time, however, the reservoir of fundamental American strengths is not to be denied.
Take politics: on the downside, polls show that a large majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation. In leadership, no politician has the stature of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman for the Democrats or Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan for the Republicans. More polls show that American voters have been turned off by this year's negative presidential election campaign. And the gridlock in Congress has caused many Americans to hold the national legislature in contempt.