Many of the responses to my last post on America insisting on being no. 1 were excellent. Let me clarify my thinking. First, and most strikingly, questioning whether American has to insist on being no. 1 and "having no peer competitor" is NOT the same as "betting against American power," as Architect claims. I am not arguing that America is certain to decline -- as Ben P reminds us, it was very fashionable to argue that America was in decline at the end of the 1980s, so much so that Joe Nye coined the term "declinism" and wrote his book "Bound to Lead," which looked quite visionary after by the early to mid-1990s. My point was not that we are bound to fall but that other powers are bound to rise -- are rising now -- and what matters most is what kind of powers they are.

Brooksfoe got it right: "What's important is that human rights-respecting democracies remain preponderantly powerful, not that the US do so." Exactly. The U.S. has an enormous stake in making sure that the current human-rights respecting democracies (I think of them as PARR governments -- Popular, Accountable, Representative, and Rights-Respecting) are preponderantly powerful, just as the U.S. has a continuing stake in maintaining its own power sufficient to defend itself and to continue as a great power with a critical leadership role in the international system. But that means working to engage China and helping/encouraging it to democratize in as many ways as possible -- see Teddy Bard's excellent post.

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