America’s obituary has been written prematurely many times, and, no, fucking ISIS won’t be the death of us. There’s always hope for a bright future for the U.S. as long as our immigration policies aren’t guided by politicians pandering to xenophobic impulses. From an Economist review of Joseph Nye’s Is the American Century Over?:

Europe is hardly a plausible challenger. Though its economy and population are larger than America’s, the old continent is stagnating. In 1900 a quarter of the world’s people were European; by 2060 that figure could be just 6%, and a third of them will be over 65.

By 2025 India will be the most populous nation on Earth. It has copious “soft power”—a term Mr Nye coined—in its diaspora and popular culture. But only 63% of Indians are literate, and none of its universities is in the global top 100. India could only eclipse America if it were to form an anti-American alliance with China, reckons Mr Nye, but that is unlikely: Indians are well-disposed towards Washington and highly suspicious of Beijing.

China is the likeliest contender to be the next hyperpower: its army is the world’s largest and its economy will soon be. (In purchasing-power-parity terms, it already is.) But it will be decades before China is as rich or technologically sophisticated as America; indeed, it may never be. By 2030 China will have more elderly dependants than children, which will sap its vitality. It has yet to figure out how to change governments peacefully. And its soft power is feeble for a country of its size. It has few real friends or allies, unless you count North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Hu Jintao, the previous president, tried to increase China’s soft power by setting up “Confucius Institutes” to teach its language and culture. Yet such a strategy is unlikely to win hearts in, say, Manila, when China is bullying the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. The staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was a soft-power success, but was undercut by the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, a pro-democracy activist, and the resulting empty chair at the ceremony to award him the Nobel peace prize. “Marketing experts call this ‘stepping on your own message’,” says Mr Nye.•