America’s Built-in Protection Against Bad Leadership
Arguing that America is in decline has been fashionable for at least three decades, since the pinnacle of the nation’s Cold War victory. Six in 10 Americans told pollsters last year that they believed the United States would be less important in the world in the future. And the COVID-19 pandemic, as The Atlantic’s George Packer has so trenchantly argued, has exposed chronic underlying failures: “a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
Yet there are reasons to believe the U.S. could emerge from the pandemic more powerful in the international order rather than less. Our democracy doesn’t produce fast, elegant solutions to problems, and it often fails to provide politicians who meet the moment
