TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/1008640.000

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The Second American Century


Was the first one just an illusion? Even if it was real, is it
over? No, says the author. But if the U.S. is to go on leading,
it must renew and rebuild itself.

By HENRY GRUNWALD

[The writer, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, was editor in
chief of Time Inc. from 1979 to 1987.]


    Look around America. Begin with New York City. Observe the
filth and decay, the turbulence and misery evoking a Third World
capital, the homeless sleeping in the streets, the haze of
drugs, the racial hate, the crime, the fear. Look at other large
American cities, most of which have some of New York in them.
And then recall the phrase the American Century.

    Turn it over in your mind. Consider the sense of American
wealth and power, almost of omnipotence, that it implied. The
effect is ironic, even heartbreaking.

    Is this still a country that can lead? A country that can
give others its ideals of freedom and justice, its formula for
creating wealth, its generosity? Was the American Century always
an illusion? And, if it was real, is it over?

    It is nearly 50 years since Henry Luce published his essay
"The American Century" in LIFE. It was a passionate argument for
intervention in World War II and a summons to global leadership,
an appeal for America to do its duty toward itself and toward
mankind. The 20th century, wrote Luce, must be, "to a
significant degree, an American Century."

    Since the publication of that essay -- or editorial or
sermon -- the phrase has echoed down the decades. It was often
questioned, ridiculed, attacked. When the Soviet Union emerged
as a nuclear power, when communism spread across the map, when
the U.S. was ignominiously defeated in Vietnam, many people
decided that it could not really be the American Century, after
all. But it was. The remaining decade is not likely to change
that.

    In technology, the U.S. led most major developments, from
the jet plane to the computer. It pioneered the move from the
industrial to the information society. It did a lion's share of
theoretical work in the sciences. For better or worse, it built
-- and used -- the atom bomb, forever changing the calculus of
war and peace. It took man to the moon. It played the major role
in proving capitalism, widely seen as doomed in the century's
first half, to be a vital and successful system. Above all, it
decisively helped defeat the two great totalitarian enemies of
freedom -- Nazism and communism.

    Communism might have collapsed of its own fatal flaws
anyway. We will obviously never know for sure. But the process
was vitally influenced by the U.S.-led revival of Europe and
Japan after World War II, by U.S. containment efforts that made
the cost of Soviet adventurism prohibitive, by the solidity of
NATO, by the drive for human rights and by the example of U.S.
-- and Western -- economic success. Even Soviet officials
acknowledge the effect of American pressure, including the arms
buildup.

    So the question is not whether this was the American Century
but: Will the next century again be American?

    To many, the mere question seems fantastic. There are
widespread announcements of the End of the American Century, the
title of a thoughtful recent book. It is one of many. Declinism
has become a growth industry, for familiar reasons: the relative
erosion of American economic power, the rise of Japan and the
European Community as serious trade rivals, the transformation
of the U.S. into a debtor nation, the disastrous shortcomings
of American education, the seeming sclerosis and corruption of
the U.S. political system -- and on and on.

    All this is accompanied by a new isolationism, the notion
that with the collapse of communism, there is not much left for
America to do in the world, that the U.S. should circle the
wagons. There is also economic isolationism, otherwise known as
protectionism. And there is the isolationism of despair: the
conviction that in winning the cold war, we spent so much of our
treasure that we no longer have the means to exert much
influence abroad -- that the U.S. is increasingly "irrelevant."

    But that was a false view, even before events in the Persian
Gulf suddenly made America very relevant indeed. The situation
is not as simple as the declinists claim, our fate surely not
that bleak. The 21st could and should be -- "to a significant
degree" -- a Second American Century.

    It is useful to look at that proposition from the
perspective, however distant, of Luce's essay, which was an
attack on the isolationism of his day.

    It began with a slap. "We Americans are unhappy," wrote
Luce. "We are nervous -- or gloomy -- or apathetic," as well as
confused about the world. "And yet we also know that the
sickness of the world is also our sickness. We, too, have
miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch. And nowhere
in the world have men's failures been so little excusable as in
the United States of America."

    Published nine months before Pearl Harbor, Luce's essay
conceded that fighting in World War II was not really necessary
as a matter of defending "our homeland." The U.S. could be made
impregnable and might live, "discreetly and dangerously," like
"an infinitely mightier Switzerland."

    So what would we be fighting for -- "Dear old Danzig or dear
old Dong Dang?" Or "Shall we use some big words like `democracy'
and `freedom' and `justice'?" Yes, Luce replied, of course. This
does not mean that it is our task "to police the whole world nor
to impose democratic institutions on all mankind including the
Dalai Lama and the good shepherds of Tibet." But America must
primarily blame herself if "the world environment in which she
lives" is "unfavorable to the growth of American life." And our
only chance to make our democracy work is as part "of a vital
international economy" and "an international moral order."

    To a large extent, Luce pointed out, it already was the
American Century, because of the influence of American culture
and products. But more was required: the spread of free
enterprise, because it could not prevail in America "if it
prevails nowhere else," and of freedom, because "without
Freedom, there can be no abundant life, but with Freedom, there
can be."

    So the U.S. must now be "the Good Samaritan of the entire
world," helping feed "all the people of the world who . . . are
hungry and destitute." But such efforts will fail unless
animated by American ideals -- love of freedom, equality of
opportunity, self-reliance but also cooperation, together with
"all the great principles of Western civilization" -- justice,
truth, charity. "It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse
from which the ideals spread . . . and do their mysterious work
of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to
what the psalmist called a little lower than the angels." Other
nations can "survive," but America can endure only if its veins
are filled with "the blood of purpose and enterprise and high
resolve."

    Most interventionists cheered Luce's appeal. But even some
of them were disturbed by the missionary's son's missionary
zeal. The Nation called Luce's program magnanimous but also smug
and self-righteous. The Literary Magazine at his alma mater,
Yale, called it "jingoistic jargon." Luce's favorite theologian,
Reinhold Niebuhr, later wrote that the very title implied an
"egoistic corruption."

    Luce, distressed and puzzled, once said he regretted using
the phrase American Century. He need not have. Sure, the title
and the piece itself had arrogant overtones, a belief in a
divinely ordained American mission. Yet there was also
chastisement for American faults and some prudent
qualifications.

    Today what seems more striking than the almost quaint
idealism and the bombastic style (forgive me, Harry) is the
degree to which, shorn of rhetoric, the essay proved to be a
realistic program, anticipating the Marshall Plan, Truman's
Point Four call for American technical assistance abroad, the
Kennedy Peace Corps, Food for Peace. America as a powerhouse of
democratic ideals, as the champion of freedom and the source of
material sustenance and technical expertise -- all animated U.S.
foreign policy the past half-century.

    What, if anything, of this vision remains valid? No matter
how American wealth and power may have changed, Luce's
assumptions still apply with remarkable force.

    The world has indeed become "indivisible," interdependent.
More than ever we -- and others -- need a "vital international
economy" with open trade. Democracy, once regarded by many as
hopelessly inefficient compared with the planned and regimented
dictatorships, has proved itself indispensable to productive
economies. We have learned much more about the connection
between the abundant life and freedom. We have also learned that
communism is really a new form of feudalism, a fixed society.
Such a society cannot create abundance.

    With the Soviet decline and the emergence of a prosperous
and uniting Europe, the U.S. contribution to the Continent's
defense and political stability, while still important, will
diminish. That is as it should be. The fact that the U.S. is
standing aside as the Germans give economic aid to the Soviets
(and the Japanese to China) may be read as a sign of reduced
American means and influence. But it is also an overdue form of
burden sharing that the U.S. has long urged and that must
increasingly be carried beyond the present NATO area.

    While the threat of an attack on Western Europe and of
global war is much reduced, the next century will bring other
dangers.

    The most important form of power will be economic, not
military. That is already a truism -- but not true everywhere.
Indeed the world can be divided into those who live in the era
of economics and those who cling to noneconomic, atavistic
forces: religion, national or tribal passions, militarism.

    The distinction is not precise or absolute. But, as the
leading example, the European Community is founded on economic
principles. A succession of terrible wars has sharply reduced
the nationalist-tribal and militarist instincts in Western
Europe. The Community is trying to build a supranational order
based on economic cooperation and competition, on material
self-interest, ultimately on reason. Japan is also pouring most
of its once militaristic energies into economic channels.

    The future of the Soviet Union could bring disintegration
or right-wing reaction, or both -- prospects all the scarier
because the Soviets still possess vast nuclear stockpiles.
Moreover, a successful transition to a market economy will take
a miracle. But one can hope the U.S.S.R., or what remains of it,
will also pursue economic development rather than expansion and
aggression.

    While Clausewitz called war a continuation of politics by
other means, economics may become a continuation of war by other
means. There may be virulent trade wars among the economic Big
Three -- Europe, Japan and America (whose sphere should
eventually include Canada and Mexico in an American Economic
Community).

    The global marketplace, however, has become so
interconnected that trade wars don't make much more sense than
real wars. Issues that once were strictly internal -- Japan's
retail distribution system, European price supports for farmers,
the U.S. budget deficit -- have become legitimate subjects of
international negotiation. This suggests that the emerging world
economy will dictate a new and more limited concept of
sovereignty.

    Even so, real or imagined unfairness in trade will persist,
as will visceral fears of one's country being overtaken and
bought up by foreigners. Fighting protectionism, the creed of
economic know-nothings, in the U.S. and elsewhere, may be the
greatest challenge to American leadership, and also its greatest
opportunity. A special advantage is that the U.S., both an
Atlantic and a Pacific power, has closer ties to Europe and
Japan than they have to each other.

    Beyond these three economic force fields, national, tribal
and religious conflicts threaten to turn many parts of the world
into larger Lebanons -- conflicts like the ones pitting Arabs
against Israelis, Islamic factions against one another, Islamic
fundamentalism against the West, Indians against Pakistanis,
among others.

    The current Middle East crisis, with Iraq ranged against
moderate Arab states and the West, is sometimes described as an
economic conflict: poor Arabs vs. rich, the "Arab world" (a
fictitious concept) vs. the oil-greedy industrialized world. But
that is at best a partial truth. Such economic issues are really
elements of those other, overarching battles of nationalism and
tribalism, conflicting faiths and competing power.

    Why should the U.S. care? In the instance of Iraq, because
of oil and Israel. But there are more general reasons. Some
years ago, a French novel imagined desperate hordes of the Third
World poor advancing on the West. One need not take that
prophecy literally to worry about terrorism and other forms of
contagion from regional conflicts and from "the wretched of the
earth." We should be able to reduce our military commitments in
the Third World, but we cannot escape them altogether. It is in
our interest to help construct some degree of world order,
especially as several Third World countries have nuclear weapons
capability. That is also why the U.S. must continue pushing for
nonproliferation. And that also strengthens the case for
continued development of nuclear defense.

    Despite the present intractability of atavistic conflicts,
they may ultimately be mitigated by the transforming promise of
economic progress, of a better life, as happened in Europe. That
will not be brought about by radical policies (in the case of
the Middle East throwing out the oil monarchs or fighting Israel
or the West), the sort of policies that have failed everywhere,
but only through a process of economic growth and integration.

    But that process will continue to be at odds with
nationalism, an imprecise term that covers both the
self-assertion of various ethnic groups within states and the
patriotic claims of the nation-states themselves.

    Because the former are increasingly in conflict with the
latter, many nation-states are becoming obsolete; the Soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, India and others demonstrate that their
artificial Nationality does not satisfy their nationalities.
Nation-states are apt to be too small and ineffective to cope
with the global economy and yet too large and insensitive to
cope satisfactorily with local problems.

    Ideally, the world needs a new view of sovereignty and new
structures that would give peoples a sense of autonomy and
identity, but within larger regional and rational economic
groupings. The U.S., which gave a huge push to the formation of
the European Community, can help develop such structures.

    Many impoverished, debt-ridden Third World countries are
only just beginning to make their way along the only path
forward -- the free market, painful and politically explosive
though that is. Again, why should the U.S. care? Even though
Marxist revolutionaries and guerrillas still carry on their
archaic battles in many places, the danger of such countries'
"going communist" is sharply diminished. But the developed world
needs Third World countries as markets. Also, economic turmoil
would put heavy pressures on the U.S. and other Western nations,
not least through growing streams of emigrants.

    The U.S. cannot engineer, let alone finance, the success of
the free market everywhere. Nor can it be the Good Samaritan to
the whole world, although well-targeted foreign aid should
continue. But the U.S. must help by seeking an open trading
system in which underdeveloped countries can sell their
products. Above all, the U.S. must push for economic and
political reforms, offering advice and entrepreneurial guidance;
one can imagine the Peace Corps being followed by a Development
Corps.

    This will have to go hand in hand with the building of
democracy. Skeptics argue that it cannot be exported, but surely
the U.S. has influenced the drive toward democracy and the
development of free institutions in a great many nations. We
must continue and expand that activity.

    But can we afford all this when our Cabinet members are
traveling the world, hat in hand, soliciting contributions to
our gulf operation? When we are fighting desperate budget
battles and haggling over Social Security and health care, Head
Start and parental leave?

    In recent years foreign assistance has equaled less than 5%
of our defense outlays. It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable
-- that the richest and most productive country in the world,
which we still are, cannot find the relatively modest means to
exert international leadership while simultaneously improving
its own society.

    It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that at the moment
when much of the world seeks to follow American political and
economic ideals, the country should consider itself too broke
to live up to these ideals, at home or abroad.

    It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that a people
responsible for unprecedented achievements in this century
should accept mediocrity and slow decline in the next.

    But must America lead? Why not try for the good life without
world responsibility? Why not, in Luce's words, settle for being
a more powerful Switzerland? Partly because Switzerland has
always been only Switzerland, while America, after playing its
global and historic role, would suffer a permanent sense of loss
and dislocation. But more important, the world has become too
interdependent for the U.S. to create a prosperous, isolated
enclave.

    While America's power to influence the world environment has
declined, it has not disappeared by any means. But to wield such
influence, the first task for the U.S. is to renew and rebuild
itself, to restore its economic growth and productive capacity
and replenish its wealth.

    The Second American Century must begin at home.

    It must begin in the schools and factories, on the mean
streets and the crumbling highways.

    It must begin in people's minds. Nearly half of all
Americans polled believe we are in decline, overtaken by the
Japanese and others. That could be a healthy stimulus to greater
effort. But the Second American Century requires a more accurate
sense of reality -- neither the heedless optimism that once held
everything to be possible for America, almost as a law of
nature, nor the new, creeping pessimism that considers America's
downfall inevitable.

    Of course, all world powers sooner or later decline, but the
timing is not foreordained.

    The Second American Century must begin with the realization
that America's problems are not primarily imposed from outside,
not by the wicked Japanese or the Colombian drug lords, but by
us.

    It must begin with a recognition that the American concept
and practice of freedom have been distorted. To the founders it
was self-evident that freedom required obligations; in the past
half-century the notion of a citizen's obligations virtually
disappeared from public discourse, while "duty" came to be
almost a code word for fascism. About the only thing that is
talked about, demanded, praised is citizen's rights (some of
them pretty exotic). The Second American Century must involve a
new balance of rights and obligations.

    We still have tremendous resources. Our share of the global
product is about what it always was, except in the unnatural
years following World War II when much of the world was
prostrate. And our GNP is almost twice that of any other
country.

    But other measurements are far more discouraging: our trade
and budget deficits; the decline in our productivity; our
personal savings rate, now a third of Japan's. Perhaps worst of
all, not even three-quarters of our students finish high school
(compared with 95% in Japan), and most of those who do are
miserably educated. Statistics aside, everywhere there are signs
of inefficiency, from the space program to the military to
everyday services.

    None of this is irreversible.

    The reform of our economy must begin, alas, with taxes. The
fact that America bears a smaller tax burden than other
developed countries is not conclusive: perhaps the others are
doing it wrong. Still, as a nation we are reluctant to pay for
what we -- the sum of all our various constituencies and
interest groups -- want. At the same time, we don't get adequate
value for the taxes we do pay. So tax increases must be balanced
by severe cuts in expenditures, especially entitlements for the
better off, plus farm and other subsidies. But a mere
split-the-difference deal on taxes will not be enough. We need
to address the nature and structure of our government.

    Industry has begun to recognize that the age of
assembly-line mass production is over and that what has been
called the second industrial revolution, based on the computer,
involves smaller, flexible units with far fewer layers of middle
management. Government, by contrast, is stuck in the political
equivalent of the assembly-line, mass-production era --
insensitive, inflexible, overregulated and overstaffed, partly
because Congress keeps mandating innumerable and conflicting
functions. Even though it may seem impossible, we must have a
long-range effort to reorganize our government machinery.

    Not that the private sector is necessarily a model. In many
ways American business has let America down. It has often been
too bureaucratic, too complacent and unimaginative, too ready
to ask for government help, too provincial and isolated from
world markets. There are signs of revitalization: industrial
productivity is rising slightly; the quality of many products
is improving. But we have a long way to go. Moreover, the
government will have to invest in America's crumbling
infrastructure. This has been done in the past, without
damaging our free market.

    Ultimately, we must look anew at the interaction between
public and private sectors. Coping with our social problems is
more complex than the usual formula of more vs. less government
intervention.

    Conventional government intervention has largely failed,
notably in the chaotic and counterproductive welfare system,
which is at once too lax and too rigid. We have been more
successful than is often realized in ending or alleviating
certain kinds of poverty. The underclass, with its devastated
family life, its single mothers and routine teenage pregnancies
(among black teenagers, nearly 90% of babies are born out of
wedlock), is a nightmare reproach to America. But it is also a
relatively isolated phenomenon -- far more so than the poverty
that festered behind the proud facades of Victorian England, for
example. It requires separate, special treatment.

    Private initiative must carry a larger share of
responsibility, but in combination with more intelligent,
imaginative and flexible government policies that tie social
services to incentives for self-help. These may range from
vouchers to enterprise zones to tenant ownership of housing
projects. The principle of combining social responsibility with
individual initiative, compassion with reward for effort,
suggests that the U.S. must partially reinvent capitalism -- and
do a more imaginative job of it than the heavily welfare-statist
economies of Europe that are increasingly retreating from
socialism.

    It has become a cliche that to restore our global
competitiveness, we need to reform our educational system. That
will take a lot more than money. The educational bureaucracy
must be curbed -- education is too important to be left to the
educators. Nor can it be left to zealous amateurs more
interested in "community rights" or minority cultural traditions
than in effective education. We must also loosen the still
strangling grasp of "progressive education." Curriculums must
be purged of mindless courses. Teachers must be given more
independence but also held to higher standards. Families must
give early support to their children's education.

    And we must stop the practice of simply taking pupils who
can't or won't learn and running them through the system toward
a meaningless diploma. Everybody has a right to education, but
that right must be earned with effort and discipline. An
alternative to the present chaos is to establish more and better
trade schools and on-the-job training programs, as well as
national civilian service.

    Each step would involve many real or imagined sacrifices for
particular groups; each one would be bitterly fought. Normally,
any change remotely as drastic happens only through war or
domestic catastrophe. So, is it simply utopian to hope for an
American revival?

    No -- thanks to three factors:

    1) Among America's greatest strengths is its capacity for
renewal; it has shed its skin again and again to re-emerge with
new life. It rebuilt itself after the Civil War and
Reconstruction; it reformed itself after the cruelties of the
19th century industrial surge and the excesses of the robber
barons; it picked itself up after the Great Depression; it made
tremendous strides in race relations through the civil rights
movement; it achieved at least partial healing after the bitter
national split over Vietnam and the counterculture's nihilism.

    America assimilates radical changes that in most other
countries could cause revolution. In America revolution is
permanent but piecemeal.

    2) The U.S. has the tremendous asset of flexibility. An
American expatriate journalist recently wondered how this
country can survive without a ruling class. Yet again and again,
ruling classes have decayed and left their countries in ruin.
It is to America's advantage that it has no permanent ruling
class and that its elites are constantly open to new blood.

    America as a whole is far more open to newcomers than any
other country in the world. Immigration has always been a source
of boundless fresh energy and enthusiasm, as millions discovered
America anew and in a sense rebuilt it in every generation.

    Obviously, immigration creates problems as well. There are
conflicts among various immigrant groups. U.S. immigration
policy is not emphasizing the influx of the skilled and
educated, thus calling into question what has been dubbed the
brain gain. Some immigrant groups, especially Hispanics, seem
to resist learning English, which in some states has already
created a bilingual culture. That raises a deeply worrisome
prospect. Is a healthy pluralism giving way to a corrosive
separatism, the ideal of tolerance to reverse racism?

    Minorities must and will recognize such trends as
self-destructive. By and large, the melting pot still works. In
the 21st century America will have a new ethnic profile. The
prospect of a Hispanic or Asian -- and surely a black --
President is quite plausible. And it is a cheering prospect,
provided only that he or she speaks to the nation in English and
governs in the tradition of the founders. That tradition has
evolved but remains the binding force and genius of America --
an ability to combine self-interest with compromise.

    3) America possesses a special instrument of change and
reform -- what might be called the civic crusade. These
grass-roots movements about particular issues have repeatedly
forced the more rigid political system to follow: in the fight
against racial discrimination, the movement for women's
equality, the drive for fair treatment of homosexuals, the
environmental movement, the campaign against smoking and many
others. Not everybody is comfortable with all these crusades
and the rights they champion. But they represent an
extraordinary American capacity to change perceptions and
habits.

    If it is possible through organized popular pressure to make
the environment and nature a major political issue, it should
be possible to do the same for education. If it is possible to
make smoking despised, it should be possible for drug use. And
it should be possible to refocus some civic crusades. The
antitax movement was an important political force, but it was
too blunt and undifferentiated. To reduce the excesses of
government bureaucracy, it is not enough to curb its spending
powers. It is far more important (and more difficult) to monitor
performance and press for efficiency.

    Yes, of course, leadership is needed. But there are times
when followers must lead until the leaders follow.

    The civic crusades also carry danger. There are so many on
behalf of so many causes, including relatively trivial ones,
that their energy can become scattered. They threaten to be no
longer civic but merely uncivil, dismissive of the rights of
others.

    But that is not wholly new. The notion that in the past the
U.S. was somehow a united community is a nostalgic illusion. The
founders warned of the dangers of "faction." Even on the
frontier, the pioneers fought not just the Indians but one
another. Interests fought other interests. Regions fought other
regions. Industrialization brought bloodletting between bosses
and labor. But despite battles that in other countries would
have wrecked social and political systems, the U.S. usually
managed to find some accommodation that satisfied nobody but,
in the end, proved workable.

    In an interdependent world with conflicting national and
ethnic claims, with people on the move as never before,
America's social flexibility and its experience with blending
many ethnic groups is an important advantage. It is a quality
notably lacking in some of the other possible claimants to
leadership in the next century.

    A united Europe, driven by a united Germany, could become
the world's leading power. Heir to a unique civilization and
used to rule, the European Community has a highly educated,
skilled population and a GNP larger than America's.

    But for all their prosperity and, in most cases, munificent
welfare arrangements, European countries show few signs of
overcoming their traditional social rigidity; one's class, one's
prospects in life remain remarkably fixed. European countries
are also strongly xenophobic, especially hostile toward
immigrants, which could become a major problem for the European
Community. Nor is it yet clear whether the Community will
continue to be inward-looking or seek a greater global role. It
is also far from certain to what extent a Europe guided by the
Brussels bureaucracy will be dedicated to vigorous free
enterprise and whether it will achieve true political union.

    In economic terms, Japan could also be the world leader. But
its economy, for all its stunning success, has serious flaws.
Much of it is based on absurdly inflated real estate values,
lavish subsidies to farmers and artificially low domestic
consumption (which is beginning to change slowly).

    Japan is even more inflexible socially and politically than
Europe. It has largely failed to include women as full members
in its economy or society. It is also profoundly xenophobic.
Japan has started to play a role in international organizations
(its foreign aid is ahead of ours), and it has the third highest
defense budget, after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. But even if it
maintains its economic edge, and develops the will to provide
political leadership, the rest of the world may have difficulty
accepting it in the foreseeable future.

    Thus the U.S. should retain its leading role -- but not by
the same wide margin. The U.S. effort in the gulf and the
international support it rallied show that there are still tasks
that only the U.S. is able and willing to undertake. It also
shows that the U.S. cannot and should not undertake them alone.
In the emerging, decentralized world, no single power will play
the kind of predominant part that was possible in the 19th and
20th centuries. It will be an era of diffused power. In his book
Bound to Lead, political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. speaks of
"soft" or "co-optive" power, that is, indirect means of
influence: winning others over through one's ideas or acting in
concert with allies and through international organizations.

    In the early years of the Republic, it was widely believed
the best, if not the only, way for America to influence the rest
of the world was by the power of its example. That "light unto
the nations" view was later ridiculed, but it has regained the
force of simple truth. The example of a tremendously successful
American economy and free institutions contributed strongly to
the downfall of communism and to the movement toward market
economies and democracy all over the world.

    So a Second American Century will require the U.S. to retain
and greatly improve its role as an example.

    Look around America. Observe, even in New York City,
alongside the decay and decline, the irrepressible drive, the
jackhammer energy, the ambition as high as the builders' cranes,
the opportunities as exciting as the turbulent street scenes.

    Observe the vast plains, still the source of the kind of
strength that only space can give. The Main Streets, often
puzzled and outraged by change, but -- so far -- willing to bend
to it, without breaking. The campuses, dotted with ugly racist
conflict but still great generators of knowledge and ideas. The
countless individual entrepreneurs and the omnipresent civic
groups, committees, associations.

    This whole strange country that can endlessly fool itself
and be fooled and yet retain a saving common sense; this
materialistic, money-driven country that is constantly caught
up in moral, sometimes naively moralistic struggles; this smug
country that is relentlessly self-critical; this freest of all
countries in the world, living both the dangers and the triumphs
of freedom.

    Observe all this and then recall the phrase American
Decline. Consider the sense of failure and loss that it implies.
The effect is disorienting and provocative. Is this really a
country that must inevitably slide downward?

    The key word is inevitably. Nothing in history is
inevitable. There can and will be a Second American Century if
Americans want it, if they are again stirred by the "blood of
purpose and enterprise and high resolve," if every individual
American is committed to extra effort and dedication, extra
thought and tolerance.

    As Luce wrote 50 years ago, nowhere in the world is failure
so little excusable as in the United States of America.