Is there any reason to think they’ll be right this time?

The bearers of bad news are back. The headlines may tell of American military victories overseas, but everywhere warnings are proliferating of troubles ahead. Most of the forecasts concern the allegedly dire consequences of the victories themselves: chaos or worse in Iraq, permanent disaffection in Europe, mounting enmity elsewhere. But a spate of new hooks point to deeper structural dangers–dangers that are said to be lurking beneath the surface of our global pre-eminence and that are mostly of our own making. Taken together, these works constitute the largest chorus of foreboding since the appearance 15 years ago of the prophets of American decline.” — Joshua Muravchik, Barrons

Mr. Muravchik, of the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute, concludes, “Had we heeded the declinists of the 1980s, we might not have won the Cold War. If today we heed the advice of those offering tendentious and pejorative interpretations of our effect on the world, the results could be no less calamitous.” No big picture for him and others in what I cal the ostrich mode of political analysis, from the fabled tendency of the ungainly and vulnerable birds to stick their heads in the sand so that the threats they do not see do not exist…