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On the other side of the Atlantic, a debate is brewing about whether American power is beginning to ebb, crest, or surge ahead. One of the more lively expressions of this debate can be found on the pages of the Times of London, where Gerard Baker and Matthew Parris have exchanged salvos about the state of our union.

Baker writes almost romantically about “a nation tirelessly willing and uniquely empowered to take on the responsibilities of global leadership.” In his view, “the world may grow and change around it, but I would not bet on America’s eclipse just yet.” He reminds us that “previous premature judgments about America’s decline enjoin us to be a little circumspect about its current difficulties.”

Indeed they do. Yet Mr. Parris counters Baker by trotting out many of those same old arguments about American decline:

“Ever-heavier burdens are being loaded upon a nation whose economic legs are growing shaky.... America 2005 is overstretched.... America has more than 350,000 troops abroad.” He goes on to spin a tale of the good old days, when America was respected and beloved the world over: “Mr. Bush said ‘freedom’ 27 times in his [inaugural] speech. John F. Kennedy could be more sparing with the word because the idea behind it shone so brightly for America then, and for the world.”

Parris could be right about America’s future, although this is an unusual moment to try to make such a case. After all, America’s is the fastest growing industrialized economy, and it remains the largest economy on earth (this after the financial body blows of September 11). Only when Europe cobbles its 25 economies together can it claim to rival U.S. economic output—and even then the claim is shaky, given the E.U.’s uncertain prospects.

From fashion to film to fast food, American culture and products are coveted and imitated around the world to an unprecedented degree. As Fouad Ajami has noted, “the world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip, and its hipness.” Especially its protection: Some 50 countries enjoy defense treaties with the United States. The U.S. military is the last (and first) line of defense for dozens of others. This role of global guarantor now includes U.S. forces in more than 100 countries.

Of course, the U.S. military does more than protect and defend: In the span of about 23 months, it overthrew two enemy regimes located on the other side of the planet and replaced them with friendly, popular governments. Not bad for a faltering empire.

Whether or not Parris’ premise is sound, it’s anything but new. A quick survey of history reminds us that “the decline and fall of America” mantra is a decennial prophecy whose fulfillment is always just around the corner.

Historian Paul Kennedy concluded that America’s decline was sealed in the late 1980s. As Elliott Abrams put it, “Kennedy’s thesis was simple: America, like the great empires that preceded it, had over-expanded, and its military expenditures were now so great that an irreversible process of decline had already set in.” By 1990, political scientists and pundits were quipping that while the U.S. and the Soviet Union waged the Cold War, Japan and Germany won it. Kennedy and other academics were certain that the two powerhouses would overtake America economically and make its military power obsolescent.

America’s overseas deployments are also far lower today than during any chapter of the Cold War. At the height of the Vietnam era, the U.S. had six-figure troop deployments in both the East Asian and European theaters, and 520,000 forces in Indochina alone. From 1947 to 1989, Americans built and manned more than 600 overseas bases, spent some $5 trillion, and sacrificed 100,000 lives to wage and win the Cold War. With a much larger economy and population, and a much smaller global footprint, the America of 2005 is certainly not any more “overstretched” than the America of 1965.

Many observers even worried that America was in decline in the 1950s, when communists fought U.S. and allied forces to a stalemate in Korea. So taxed was the U.S. in Northeast Asia that Washington called for German re-armament in late 1950. American power was thought to be waning well before then in the late 1940s when “we lost China,” and in the immediate postwar period, as Americans read news stories about failure and futility in occupied Germany.

In other words, we’ve heard it all before.