America in 2010: Entering a New Decade with a Hangover From the Last

When historians look back at America's global position during this decade, they'll confront a nation of such fluctuating fortunes that what they write will read like fiction.

In the eyes of the world since 2000, the United States has been on a long, unending roller-coaster ride. With three different presidents at the controls -- George W. Bush for eight years and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for one each -- the country has roared through periods of flush economic times and superpower superiority before hurling into stretches of fear-inducing indebtedness and high anxiety about challengers to international pre-eminence.

September 11, 2001, is, of course, the decade's watershed moment, and from it flows much of what's happened since that day. Until then, the relative peace and prosperity of the 1990s prevailed in the new century, and candidate Bush could say during his second debate with Al Gore in 2000 that the "nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we have to be humble."

In the wake of 9/11, the world was on America's side, with sympathy and support a nearly universal response. Dispatching military forces to Afghanistan in October of 2001 seemed logical retribution to punish perpetrators of the attacks and to deter future ones.

Then, though, articulation of the Bush Doctrine, with its full-throated avowal of pre-emptive war, and the controversy over invading Iraq ended any talk of a humble foreign policy. The perceived hubris started to turn world opinion away from America, as the multination surveys of the Pew Global Attitudes Project kept substantiating.

When unilateralist adventurism resulted in the Iraq war, and revelations about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and rendition sites became widely known, the United States no longer seemed a shining city on a hill to the outer world, and the nation's standing precipitously declined.

Despite an effort during Bush's second term to reach out and foster more alliances, people in most countries didn't change their minds. Bush's departure from the White House was greeted with such relief that Obama became a three-cheers beneficiary, in large part through comparison to his predecessor.

To be sure, Obama spoke and acted differently. Multicultural in his personal background, he espoused multilateralism in his foreign policy and his approach to the world. In addition, while Bush projected a Yankee-oriented idealism, Obama seems inclined to pursue a more realistic worldview.

Many might forget, but in Bush's second inaugural address he went so far as to say: " It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

By contrast, Obama in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize last month, appeared simultaneously strong and pragmatic, noting at one point: "America's commitment to global security will never waver. But in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace."

Trying to achieve peace in concert with others is oceans apart from putting a stop to tyranny wherever it might exist.

Interestingly, Bush's rhetoric and decision-making between 2001 and 2005 provoked robust debate about America's stature in the world and whether the nation qualified as an "empire" in the historical sense of that term. Especially abroad, books with such titles as "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, American Dream/Global Nightmare and Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America" made readers consider the United States more seriously, and the BBC in 2004 even produced a six-part radio documentary, "Age of Empire," about America's position economically, politically, militarily, and culturally.

Closer to home and more recently, other books offered more sobering, cautionary assessments. Cullen Murphy's "Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America" appeared in 2007, followed by Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" a year later. For two successive weeks this past month, Newsweek has featured probing cover stories: "How Great Powers Fall" and "The Post-Imperial President," with the first explaining that "steep debt, slow growth, and high spending kill empires" and the other about the more tempered and realistic foreign policy of the Obama administration.

For America, it's been a decade of more peaks and valleys than exist in Afghanistan. Yet trying to figure out the nation's standing and trajectory, its vagaries and vicissitudes, isn't exactly new.

Back in 1987, Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" stoked debate about "imperial overstretch" and American decline. But then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the Cold War ended and America rebounded to enjoy a decade of growth and, ultimately, a balanced governmental budget.

What awaits the United States in the coming decade and beyond? With Afghanistan and Iraq still battlegrounds, the continuing threat of terrorism, and Iran and North Korea potential troublemakers of global proportions, predicting the winner of the 2015 World Series or Super Bowl is an easier task and a safer bet.

Max Lerner, the late columnist and author of "America as a Civilization," had a personal credo about his adopted country. "Our destiny as a people rests not in our stars but in ourselves," he wrote three decades ago. "I am neither optimist nor pessimist. I am a possibilist." That's as hopeful as one can be as the new decade dawns.