The last few years have seen no shortage of books examining the decline of the United States from the position of extraordinary power that it wielded over the last several decades. Journalists have led the way in the popular domain, while political scientists, economists, and other social scientists have produced a steady stream of scholarly work on the causes and implications of recent trends. For their part, however, historians have lagged behind, perhaps due to discomfort within their discipline about addressing contemporary affairs.

In The Short American Century, Andrew J. Bacevich overcomes this barrier by bringing together nine eminent historians to examine the causes and consequences of the nation's diminishing strength. The result is a provocative and mostly engaging collection of essays that deserves an audience of scholars, general readers, and perhaps advanced undergraduates. The book's success lies partly in the device that Bacevich uses to give it focus and coherence. In February 1941, media tycoon Henry Luce published an essay in Life magazine urging Americans to discard their isolationist tendencies and embrace a position of global leadership – to establish, in Luce's phrase, an “American century” marked by the worldwide spread of US-style democracy and capitalism. Bacevich's charge to his contributors was to ruminate on the notion of an “American century” and assess the significance of its passing.

The authors, including such acclaimed historians as Emily Rosenberg, Akira Iriye, David M. Kennedy, and Walter LaFeber, concur that the moment of American hegemony has indeed passed and that, as the title of the collection suggests, the American century lasted much less than the hundred years promised by Luce. But beyond this basic point, the essays diverge in fascinating ways. Whereas most authors are comfortable with the idea that the United States did exert extraordinary influence for at least some time, one author – LaFeber – disputes that there was even an abbreviated American century. LaFeber catalogs the difficulties that the United States had in imposing its political and economic priorities on the rest of the world even at the alleged height of its power during the early Cold War or the 1990s.

The essays that accept the notion of a short American century split over the most salient characteristics of American might. For Kennedy, US hegemony rested on the nation's ability to build alliances and inspire allegiance. For Eugene McCarraher, it consisted of economic dominance wielded by self-righteous business elites and likeminded policymakers. Rosenberg, Iriye, and Jeffrey A. Frieden take a less critical approach, suggesting that Americans exercised power above all by establishing institutions and social norms that continue to prevail around the world even if recent developments have undermined the strength of the United States itself.

Essayists differ too over the fundamental cause of American decline. Kennedy cites a failure of leadership by the George W. Bush administration, which squandered the goodwill built up over previous decades. T. J. Jackson Lears emphasizes the inability of dissenters to articulate a convincing alternative to the ambitious and ideologically charged foreign policies that, in his view, ultimately undermined the nation's power. Several other chapters focus on consumerist excesses or other economic problems as the root cause of decline.

The biggest disappointment of The Short American Century is that Bacevich did not do more to explore these different points of view in his introduction or afterword, which are curiously brief. There is something to be said, of course, for letting the essays speak for themselves. Yet greater effort to draw out the larger meaning of the chapters might have helped readers get more out of the book. Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University, undoubtedly would have been up to the challenge. With each new book, Bacevich has established himself more fully not only as a major contributor to public debates about national security policy but also as an influential scholar whose critical perspective echoes that of the great dissenter historians Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. Alas, The Short American Century, while consistent with the general thrust of Bacevich's earlier works, offers very little of his fresh and powerful voice.

Otherwise, the book suffers only from the usual problems of edited volumes. While generally strong, some essays are more incisive than others, and several draw heavily on previous work that will be familiar to some readers. Also, there are redundancies and holes. Whereas economic themes get heavy attention, there is no chapter focussed on military affairs, religion, or global public opinion, to name but three possibilities.

None of this amounts to significant criticism, however, and The Short American Century deserves a prominent place among recent work exploring the rise and fall of American power since 1941. With luck, it will encourage more historians to take up similar themes.