Still more on the emerging global order

Will Hutton supplies the inevitable contrarianism to the US declinist thesis. It's a useful corrective, though as often happens in these debates, there is a straw man element to Hutton's argument. For instance, you'd be hard pressed to find Fareed Zakaria — the most prominent of the declinists (although we ought to come up with a less pejorative name, since Zakaria only argues America is in relative decline) — agreeing with Hutton's claim that 'the American economy is a busted flush'. Hutton says that's the 'fashionable view', though he supplies no names of those who hold it. Nor am I aware that anyone warning of the relative decline of the US against China would actually prefer this state of affairs, another Hutton inference.