America-bashing predates even America itself, with French Enlightenment <em>philosophes</em> claiming that the colony was doomed, and one critic reporting that the colony’s population was “astonishingly idiotic [and] enervated.” As the United States became a superpower after World War II, a more virulent, politically charged form of declinism emerged in the 1950s amid hysteria that “the Russians are coming.” It was followed by the European miracle, Japan’s “Rising Sun,” and now the looming Chinese behemoth. While declinism may be catnip for the media and gloating Europeans eager to play up America’s “has-been” status, the actual facts do not corroborate the contentions, as Josef Joffe, a leading German commentator and American academic, demonstrates in this history of American declinism from the age of Sputnik to Obama. The result is a highly provocative examination of how the United States, for all its failings, continues to be an unending force of rejuvenation today.