The debate over the fate of American power goes on. First consider a post this week by Ezra Klein. Klein essentially argues: if America is a declining power, no worries, someone else will handle the job. Klein writes:

Central to the nationalist's lament is that having a huge, rich, stable country like America has been very good for the world. It's led to technological progress and economic improvement and relative peace and all the rest of it. The reasons for that are no secret: America's riches allowed it to invest in innovation. Its wealth allowed it to trade. Its economic ties gave it a strong interest in global stability. All this was good for America, yes, but also good for other countries that benefited from our rise. All this, however, also applies to a strong, rich, stable China, or India, or integrated European union. …

This thinking betrays an apathy over the decline of U.S. power. But more importantly, it ignores history. Not all dominant powers have used their dominance similarly. Consider what I wrote in April, In Defense of Pax Americana:

… Expect no Beijing consensus. As James Fallows recently wrote, "No other nation that could build roads, airports, and industrial parks as modern as China's could impose so repressive a political regime."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed, "When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty."

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are not traveling to China. Indeed, China seems to have a reckoning brewing with its impoverished masses. On the world stage, China sells arms to Sudan and just this past week, with Russia, stalled UN Security Council measures to press North Korea away from brinkmanship.

If this is to be the Chinese century, as some contend, the Middle Kingdom has not yet found its sense of outward mission. Only last year, the Chinese navy took part in its first operation beyond the Pacific and this was to protect Chinese vessels from pirates in the waters off Somalia. America's pledge of freedom has often been undercut by its effort to secure power. China is focused on power alone.

And the data, exhibiting this U.S. "force for good" argument, is in the article.

But what now to do? On the other side of the political spectrum, from Klein, is Charles Krauthammer.

Krauthammer recently wrote an essay arguing the decline of American power is now a “choice,” and Obama is making all the wrong choices. He writes:

…the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power--the old Clintonian view--but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.

… In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline--to make America essentially one nation among many.

Clearly, and most potently since the Vietnam War, there has been a strong voice in American liberalism that sees U.S. power for its worst face, rather than its best. And this vein of thinking has over-idealized soft power. They forgot the role of hard power that Kennedy-Truman-FDR understood.

Krauthammer, however, neglects to point out that we witnessed the opposite extreme on the right. In George W. Bush's time, there was an over reliance on hard power. Iraq is the most tragic of examples. If the future of the U.S. involves choice, as Krauthammer rightly suggests, some of Bush's key choices made us less powerful.

In my view, it's too early to tell where Obama's foreign policy will lead us. Obama sounded idealistic at first. He has since taken on a realism unseen since H.W. Bush (e.g.-- concessions on missile defense to Russia, not meeting with the Dali Lama, watching his words on the green revolution in Iran). Let's give our president time to prove these careful steps can take us somewhere.

Initially, Obama's tone was too apathetic about the decline of U.S. power. And I wrote so much in the Pax Americana article. But, by the time we came to his Cairo speech, Obama had learned a lesson. Here are a few lines:

The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words – within our borders, and around the world.

Obama should keep up these lines. He should seek the benefits of engagement. But he must not forget that engagement is not a value but a means to an end. And if engagement does not serve that end, then something else must-- if the end is important enough. And some ends are.

But give him time. Obama may prove a realist who wields idealism carefully, more loosely in word than action. That was the post Bay of Pigs Kennedy, after all.

All good presidents learn lessons. All good presidents use both hard and soft power. Both types of power can keep the United States very powerful. And yes, that would be a good thing. I agree with Krauthammer, on this front. The American super power need not be past tense. Choices matter. But Obama seems to get this too. That's why he's taking his time before making the next big choice on Afghanistan.