By Andrew O'Hehir, review of Amy Chua's "Day of Empire":

[I]mperial powers have universally thrived by accepting and accommodating cultural diversity... but such imperial expansion eventually reaches a tipping point, triggering internal conflict and xenophobia, which leads to imperial decline...

Unlike the Roman and British empires, the American imperium... has little to offer the rest of the world beyond a cultural and ideological bill of goods that is viewed with increasing suspicion. ... our decrepit colossus lumbers around the world feeling unloved, bearing freedom's cup in one hand and an M16 rifle in the other... The American promise of a blend of democracy and capitalism that could make the whole world America-like is hardly taken seriously by anyone anymore, and it's only Americans, cosseted by a soft 'n' squishy mountain of consumer debt and buffeted by wall-to-wall media coverage of Britney's latest indiscretion, who don't know it.

Do we seriously believe the world hasn't noticed that American democracy has been eaten out from within, like a cotton boll infested with weevils, and that American consumer capitalism, cruel as it can be, bears almost no resemblance to the "free markets" inflicted on the developing world? After surveying the global wave of anti-Americanism that flowed from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the xenophobic post-9/11 backlash within the U.S., Chua concludes that transforming the country into "an aggressively militaristic hyperpower" would be massively costly both in human and financial terms, "without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past."

That's a fine conclusion as far as it goes. Chua's mistake, I believe, is to assume -- naively, after all the reading she's done -- that political leaders in 21st century America still possess the will, the ability or even the power to stop the inexorable process of imperial decay.