Abstract
That America is on the decline and about to be upstaged by new contenders from its position as the number one world power has been an incessant refrain in current literature, not surprisingly among its friends and opponents, but the „Declinists‟ in America itself. This, as Josef Joffe lays out in his The Myth of America’s Decline, is a fairy tale that has been sold mostly by those contending for the office. Editor and publisher of Die Zeit, a German newspaper, and Fellow, Hoover Institution and the Institute for International Studies, Joffe lays out convincing arguments countering the “doomsters” who have been predicting the end of the American empire and the shrinking of American power and prestige over the five decades since 1950.