A popular question in current political and news magazines asks: “Is America a declining nation?” Have we, after wielding perhaps the greatest power in the western world since the Roman Empire, finally gone over the top and are now started on our way down?

An article in Foreign Affairs discusses this question in “The End of the Long American Century; Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power (” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2025.) President Donald Trump, the authors say, “misses a major dimension of power. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attrition. The first two are hard power; the third is soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but over the long term, soft power often prevails.”

America certainly made mistakes in the last third of the twentieth century, when the Soviet Union declined and disappeared while western nations increased economically and politically. However, most of the world saw the United States as basically a force for good in a struggle with the Soviet bloc. I have in my files a picture of young Europeans clustered around American diplomats visiting Europe shortly after the Soviet Union fell, the young people eager to discuss ideas with them.

We and the allied powers, survivors of World War II, had now defeated the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist as of December 25, 1991, without war.

We played a good hand and won, but now other conflicts are following on the heals of that victory: Israel/Palestine; Ukraine/Russia; China/Taiwan; conflicts in Mali and other African nations.

The need is not for armies but for peacemakers and persuaders. Can the U.S. remake itself again, into the soft power now called for?