Byline: Jon Meacham
Perhaps naively, I have always been skeptical of what you might call the Gibbonization of America--that we are, like Rome, fated to inevitable decline. Admittedly, history offers little support for my view that things are rarely as bad as people think they are, but there is a dangerous solipsism in the tendency to believe that the problems of the day are inherently more difficult and intractable than those that faced earlier generations. To take only one example, the Civil War was pretty bad.
It was with a measure of wariness, then, that I opened the galleys of Fareed Zakaria's new book, "The Post-American World," which we excerpt on our cover this ...