EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA: Is the United States simply one nation among many — or is it the leader of the world?

This characteristic ability of the United States to respond to challenges, reinvent itself, and rebound is not to suggest that American preeminence is guaranteed in the coming decades. Rather, it means only that our destiny is in our own hands, should we have leadership that is intent on ensuring American predominance. The current rise of world hegemons like India and China recall similar warnings of a Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a postwar Soviet colossus of the 1950s and 1960s, a supposedly dominant Japan, Inc. during the 1970s, and a purportedly more moral and vibrant E.U. of the 1990s and 2000s. In every instance, the new ascendant rival eventually proved wanting in comparison to the United States. In other words, it is our decision whether China becomes our master or recedes, as did former twentieth-century competitors to the United States such as Germany, Russia, Japan, and the European Union.

In 2012, the public should ask the presidential candidates whether they believe America should accept a new role as merely one of many, or will they take the necessary steps to ensure our country’s traditional preeminence—as our perennially rebounding nation has done so often in the last seventy years.

It should -- and will again -- be leader of the free world.