Five Roads to the Future -- Whose Century Will This Be?

Early in 1941, Henry Robinson Luce, the founder of Life magazine, spoke in Tulsa, Oklahoma at a dinner hosted by an association of oilmen. Europe was already at war and Japan's attack on America at Pearl Harbor was nearly a year away. Luce, though, had a vision of America's global destiny in a world that seemed bent on destruction. "Ours is the power, ours is the opportunity -- and ours will be the responsibility whether we like it or not," he declared. In February, these remarks became the basis of "The American Century," a still-famous five-page editorial in the pages of Life, in which Luce, as one biographer noted, "equated a happy future with American hegemony."

The American Century, always an inflated notion, can now officially be declared over. Its demise is partly a result of American folly -- like the war in Iraq, which cost the U.S. its credibility with allies all over the world, and the financial crisis, which tarnished the American model of unfettered free-market capitalism and has left the country mired in debt. But even without such missteps, it was never in the cards for America to reign in perpetuity -- while the Chinas and Indias of the world stayed on their knees.

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