Unhappily, for those who like to imagine that globalization can produce "win-win" finishes, China's slowdown will be America's gain. The story of American growth slipping by a point will pale in comparison to the three or even four point slip in China. If the U.S. grows 2.5 percent this year, and China slips to 7 percent, the United States should regain the title it lost to China in 2007: that of the single largest contributor to global growth.

This year, the United States will also grow faster than the global average for the first time since 2003, the year an unprecedented boom in emerging market growth began. For the next four years, emerging market growth doubled to over 7.0 percent, creating the widespread perception that the rich nations of the West were being overtaken by the rise of the poor. Now, the historic norm is reasserting itself -- the big emerging nations are slowing dramatically, and the coming years are once again likely to produce more laggards than winners. As of 2007 the emerging markets were on average growing three times faster than the United States; now they are growing only twice as fast.

Evidence of an American revival, against both developed and emerging world competition, is mounting, driven by the traditional strengths of the American economy--its ability to innovate and adapt quickly. America's worst worries -- heavy debt, slow growth, the fall of the dollar and the decline of manufacturing -- will look much less troubling when compared to its direct rivals. While US growth has slowed by a full point so has growth in Japan and Europe, leaving the United States on top of the league of rich nations.

In a global economy that is increasingly shaped by competing forms of capitalism, the American brand appears to be winning. Consider the key challenge of "deleveraging" or digging out from debt. A new study from the McKinsey Global Institute shows that the United States is the only major developed economy that is even loosely following the path of countries that successfully negotiated similar debt-induced recessions, like Sweden and Finland in the 1990s. Total debt as a share of GDP has fallen since 2008 by 16 percent in the United States, while rising in Germany and rising sharply in Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. As in Sweden during the 90s, the fall in total US debt is due entirely to sharp cuts in the private sector, particularly the finance industry and private households.

The weak link in the U.S. response to the debt crisis is the government. The Scandinavian cases show that government needs to start cutting spending and debt roughly four years after the downturn -- exactly the stage where the US is today. Washington has so far failed to put in place a plan for long-term debt reduction, in part because some politicians and pundits are still pushing for more borrowing to ward off "depression." The Scandinavian cases suggest this is exactly the wrong worry right now. The public debt is a big reason that long-term US growth is likely to slow, but even then, it is important to keep America's debt problem in perspective. China is arguably worse off, with total debt equal to 180 percent of GDP. The more wealthy you are, the more debt you can carry, so America's total debt (350 percent) is actually less of a challenge.