As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on the Fourth of July, European commentary has settled into a familiar register that we all have heard before: Donald Trump is administering the death blow to American democracy, the institutions are crumbling, and China stands ready to inherit the earth, and that the American century is ending.
Maybe. But then again, we have heard this story before, and there is a simple test for this genre: Replace the name Donald Trump with George W. Bush and most of these pieces could still have been published, almost word for word, twenty years ago. Replace China with Japan and they could have run in the late 1970s, when we were told how the “Island of the Rising Sun” will overtake the United States. There was an even more amusing subgenre created by people like Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a 2004 book claiming that “Europe’s vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American Dream.”
Still, Mr. Rifkin has yet to surpass my all-time favourite, a 2009 piece by “analyst” Parag Khanna, that announced the EU as the world’s first “metrosexual superpower” poised to strut past “bumbling United States on the catwalk of global diplomacy”. I could do this all day, but I will end with John Kampfner’s 2020 book with the hilarious title “Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country.” Nobody embodies the perpetual teenager (albeit with a few wrinkles, given its demographics) better than Germany: A country that out of sheer spite destroyed its own energy supply and created one of history’s worst migration crisis. Very grown up, indeed, as the British would say.
