Thesis on America's decline not panning out

Washington

SOME BT readers may not be old enough to remember a time when the conventional wisdom among the experts was that Japan would overtake America sooner or later. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and a few years before the American economic boom of the 1990s, before the bulls would run in Wall Street and before Silicon Valley would become the wonder of the world, lawmakers in Washington and leading pundits were predicting that the super-charged Japanese economy of the time would eclipse the then-waning American one.

Historian Paul Kennedy argued in his book The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers that, not unlike other great powers in the past, the American economy would be bankrupted by its military spending, while Japan and Europe would be zooming ahead. In The Coming War with Japan, strategic analyst George Friedman predicted that Japan would translate its economic power into military might and would be able to beat the United States in a military confrontation. And with the media highlighting reports about Japanese investors buying real estate in Manhattan and Sony Corporation's acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989 , novelist Michael Crichton painted in his novel Risin…