America must manage its decline

America must manage its decline?: Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”. That may be all well and good for the British, but their decline came as the sun finally set on their empire. That is the consequence of being a tiny island nation that didn’t always have enough to get by. But the promise of America lay in the bounty of our resources as well as our people. And we must learn to use them again. After all who is there to turn towards if we decline . . . China?