Many commentators worry about the US' inefficient political system. True, the US' founding fathers created a system of checks and balances designed to preserve liberty at the price of efficiency. Moreover, the US is now experiencing a period of intense partisan polarization. But nasty politics is nothing new to the US: its founding era was hardly an idyll of dispassionate deliberation. The US government and politics have always experienced such episodes, and, though overshadowed by current melodramas, they were sometimes worse than today's.

The US undoubtedly faces serious problems: public debt, weak secondary education, and political gridlock, to name just a few. But one should remember that these problems are only part of the picture and, in principle, they can be solved over the long term.

It is important to distinguish the problems that can be solved from those that cannot. Of course, whether the US can implement the available solutions is uncertain; several commissions have proposed feasible plans to change the US' debt trajectory by raising taxes and cutting expenditures, but feasibility is no guarantee that they will be adopted. Still, Lee Kuan Yew is probably right to say that China "will give the US a run for its money," but not surpass it in overall power in the first half of this century.

If so, the gloomy predictions of absolute US decline will turn out to be as misleading as similar predictions in decades past. And, in relative terms, while the "rise of the rest" means that the US will be less dominant than it once was, this does not mean that China will necessarily replace the US as the world's leading power.

The author, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is a professor at Harvard and author of The Future of Power. Project Syndicate.

(China Daily 10/10/2011 page8)