The debate about American decline is at least as old as the nation itself. In the decades after 1776, European elites confidently dismissed American democracy as fleeting; Alexis de Tocqueville was a notable exception. Like him, Joseph S. Nye argues that America's prospects are considerable. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a great recession, Russian revanchism, and the resurgence of China have variously spawned a re-rebirth of scholarship on where US power is heading. Nye has provided possibly the shortest and the most readable and refreshingly realistic among several competing books on this theme.

The short answer he gives to the question posed in the title is “no,” but this does mean that the present century, in terms of American power, will resemble its predecessor. If the United States adapts itself accordingly, and its capacity to adapt remains significant, it will have “primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041,” similar but not identical to that enjoyed in 1941 (14).

To what must it adapt? Not necessarily “the rise of the rest,” says Nye. None of the purported challengers to the United States is close to replacing it. The soft power of the BRICs is negligible, argues Nye. Seventeen US universities are ranked in the top twenty globally. China has only one in the top hundred, and Russia, India, and Brazil have zero. Nearly 40 per cent of Indians are illiterate. BRIC elites send their children to American schools, not the other way around. These disparities, as Nye documents, are repeated in economics. Brazil's per capita income is ninety-fifth in the world. And in terms of hard military power, “the United States retains at least a 10:1 advantage over China without even counting American allies” (57).

Nye is not dismissive of China – its prospects get a separate chapter and inform much of the analysis elsewhere – but he is realistic. The remarkable growth of its economy has not yet produced a military capable of matching the US in terms of technological sophistication, nor a popular culture – and its attendant soft power – that comes close to the attractiveness of America's. China's autocratic capitalism has become adept at making things but not at inspiring their creation: “Chinese often complain that they produce iPhone jobs, but not Steve Jobs” (52).

Nye concedes that the US government has become temporarily dysfunctional but, unlike in China, American soft power is produced by civil society – “everything from universities and foundations to Hollywood and pop culture” – not from government: “China makes the mistake of thinking that government is the main instrument of soft power. In today's world, information is not scarce but attention is, and attention depends on credibility. Government propaganda is rarely credible” (61).

Even if the Chinese government had the ability to let the flowers of civil society bloom without its direction, it is still not obvious to Nye why any reformulation of Communist Party power would entail revisions to the US-led economic order from which China has benefited hugely. America's role in Asia has both pacified China's historical opponent, Japan, and facilitated China's rise from famine state to economic superpower. What is the Chinese interest in expelling the United States from its region? American power has given China a security it has rarely enjoyed before.

So what is all the fuss about? Nye's answer here is “absolute decline.” That is, decline not for reason of others rising but because the United States itself is weakening internally. Rome, after all, did not succumb to the rise of another empire. Rather, the invading barbarian hordes helped bring Rome down because it had “suffered an absolute decline in its society, economy, and institutions.” “Is America like Rome?” asks the author (72).

Nye's ultimate conclusion to this question is “no.” Unlike Rome, the United States enjoys a popular legitimacy amongst its citizens that is highly resistant to economic downturns and military setbacks. Where some see “the coarseness of popular culture as proof of absolute decline, others see striking changes in gender and race relations as progress” (72). “Diversity is strength” has become a hackneyed slogan of the campus left but America lends it proof. America is too puritan and too pornographic, too religious and too secular. It is endemically racist and has the son of a Kenyan goat herder as its President. Whilst some attribute US decline to gridlock in Washington others observe a rebirth of local government, where democratic experimentation was always meant to reside.

As Nye points out, “past culture battles over slavery, prohibition, McCarthyism, and civil rights were more serious than any of today's issues. People often attribute a golden glow to the past and that makes it easy to assert decay” (73). Nye does not offer a hymn to American perfection. He does offer a concise contextualization of imperfections. Incarceration rates, children in poverty, gun deaths and Donald Trump's anti-immigrant nativism compromise American soft power. But its immigrant culture, population growth, religious freedom, economic entrepreneurialism and almost realized energy independence mean it remains a pole of attraction unlike any other power in the world today. “The facts,” he says, “make it hard to draw a sustainable analogy between the United States and Rome”; “describing the twenty-first century as one of American decline is likely to be inaccurate and misleading” (92, 116).