China would appear the most logical candidate to surpass the United States. Beckley isn’t buying it. “China is big but inefficient. … The United States, by contrast, is big and efficient.” China has to spend egregiously to produce its growth, and while its results have been impressive, on no per capita metric (for example, education, productivity or income) is China close to the United States. Beckley also convincingly dents the emerging view of China as a military threat. It is surrounded by neighbors with formidable defenses and confronts a United States that has built up decades of military stock, forward bases and advanced systems.

The greatest threat to the nation’s hegemony for Beckley is not a rising power but domestic decay, which, he worries, will make life worse for most Americans. His suggestions that we end gerrymandering and try to increase voter turnout, while laudable, seem tacked on and thin compared with the overall statistical rigor of his argument. He also does not adequately grapple with the precipitous decline of American soft power in recent years. Still, if his perspective about the imperviousness of American power strikes a dissonant note in our current pessimistic climate, the evidence he assembles should be part of any serious debate about where we are heading.

THE JUNGLE GROWS BACK

America and Our Imperiled World

By Robert Kagan

179 pp. Knopf. $22.95.

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The post-World War II liberal order of nation-states bound by treaties and international institutions, and favoring democracy, capitalism and the rule of law, has, in Kagan’s telling, seen more peace and prosperity than any other time in history. But its continuance is anything but guaranteed, and its emergence after 1945 was “a great historical aberration” that saw the simultaneous collapse of the old power centers of Europe and Asia and the rise of a liberal, capitalist, democratic United States committed to internationalism and locked in a competition with a nuclear Soviet Union. The result was a sharp break from a past of endless cycles of powers rising, warring and falling, and one that saw “amazing progress over the past seven decades.”

Now, however, that system is in jeopardy. The jungle — that place of chaos and disorder and war — “is growing back. History is returning. Nations are reverting to old habits and traditions.” Kagan does not lay all the blame on the United States, but he does see the country as responsible, through acts of omission and commission, for letting the system unravel. Trump is accelerating that, though he cannot be faulted for the rise of antidemocratic nationalism in Europe or the return of Asian rivalries. Kagan passionately believes that the only way to beat back the jungle and reverse these dangerous trends is for the United States to recommit itself to lead.

To do that, Kagan concludes, Americans must first address the fraying of the liberal order domestically. On that score he is fairly sanguine: “Americans will come out of it.” They “cannot escape the principles of the Declaration, even if they want to. They have nowhere else to go.” Not so the rest of the world. As much as many Americans would like to turn inward, that path will imperil the United States. Kagan may well overstate the role the United States can and should play going forward, but he powerfully underscores just how tenuous the world order is and always has been.