Word: overstretched
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American triumph in the '90s came as a rude surprise to some. Only a decade ago, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers ushered in the conventional wisdom that America, suffering from "imperial overstretch," was in decline. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it was assumed that the world would go from cold war bipolarity to multipolarity. After all, was not Japan flourishing, Europe unifying, China rising...
...vital link between economic and military power. So what if Kennedy -- never a popularizer -- force-fed readers far more about the Habsburg Empire than most of them ever wanted to know? What mattered was that his thesis (a debt-ridden U.S. was fast running the risk of "imperial overstretch") perfectly captured the edgy mood of the late Reagan years, as opinion leaders began to brood that it was twilight in America...
With Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Kennedy has fallen victim to the academic version of imperial overstretch. The genesis of the new book, as Kennedy explains, came during a 1988 conference when he was criticized for not addressing "those forces for global change, such as population growth, the ; impact of technology, environmental damage and migration, which were transnational in nature." Perhaps a more modest scholar than Kennedy might have responded that he was, for all his erudition, primarily a historian and not an agronomist, a climatologist or a demographer...