From America the Omnipotent to America the Doomed

Ian Buruma has a nice New Yorker gang review of books on the decline of the US, or is it the rise of China/India etc.? I enjoyed his take on Robert Kagan: "Reading Kagan is like reading the work of a very clever Marxist: the logic is impeccable, even when the premise is wrong."

Buruma has a deadly eye for bad premises and overgeneralizations, of which Kagan is far from the only supplier. B. himself treads somewhere between the optimistic liberal internationalists who think prosperity will automatically bring peaceful cooperation on one hand, and the gun-toting neocons and their thuggish president on the other.