The oughts can't end a moment too soon.

What does the decade of 2010-20 hold in store? There is already a consensus among America's commentariat. We are told that the near future will see the decline of the United States and the rise of China in global power politics and, as an added attraction, the decline of the nation-state.

Yeah, sure. I'll believe it when I see it.

I've heard it before. Born in 1962, I have followed the public discussion in this country for nearly half a century. And as I think back on the five decades of my life to date, what impresses me is the repetition of two themes in public discourse: the dramatic rise and fall of the U.S. and other great powers, and claims of radical changes in the very nature of world politics. When I hear these same sensational themes recycled, my response is a yawn.

Take the rise and fall of the great powers, a subject that has engaged me since I took Paul Kennedy's course on the subject at Yale in the 1980s. I have lived through enough cycles of exaggeration to be skeptical about claims that radical changes in the global distribution of power and wealth will end American primacy in the near future. In the 1970s, the Soviets were supposed in some quarters to be on the verge of surpassing the U.S. not only in military strength but also in economic power. Then the Soviet empire fell apart, and it turned out that CIA analysts and other alleged experts had grossly exaggerated the size of the Soviet economy and the efficiency of the Soviet armed forces.

But the theme of the imminent downfall of the U.S. was too good to be abandoned. So a substitute was found for the Soviet leviathan in the Japanese juggernaut. In the 1980s, there were predictions that Japan might actually surpass the U.S. in gross domestic product by 2000. Tom Clancy wrote a novel in which Japanese militarists blow up the U.S. Capitol and slaughter America's top leaders. Business school gurus recommended Japanese management techniques like singing company songs. And then the bottom fell out of the Japanese real estate and stock markets and Japan went into a prolonged slump from which it has yet to recover.

In the 1990s, American pundits lurched to the other extreme. Following the implosions of the Soviet Union and Japan, America's best and brightest declared almost unanimously that the U.S. was not a declining empire after all. No, America was an unstoppable super-duper-hyper-megapower! U.S. victories in a couple of wars in which a military designed to defeat the Warsaw Pact was deployed to crush bankrupt, backward countries like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan were interpreted as proof that the world -- and not just bankrupt, backward countries -- trembled before the might of Washington's legions. Otherwise sensible people, swept up in the conventional wisdom, wrote things like, "Not since Rome has a single state been as powerful as the United States of America."

This neo-imperial triumphalism shaped U.S. policy during the Bush years, when Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department, in the silliest government seminars of all time, invited historians to speculate on lessons for the Pax Americana from ancient empires. Let's combine Byzantine diplomacy with Hittite battlefield tactics ...

Then it turned out that a handful of terrorists hijacking airplanes could temporarily crater the U.S. economy and make Americans afraid of their own shadows, while small numbers of insurgents with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could make American occupations of other countries too costly for the American people to stomach. So much for the greatest empire since Rome. The imaginary Pax Americana was as short-lived as the imaginary Pax Nipponica and the imaginary Pax Sovietica that preceded it.

The lesson I take from all of this is that the distribution of power and wealth in the world is far more stable than you would think if you listened to our manic-depressive public discourse, where America is always either on the brink of catastrophic decline or unchallengeable global supremacy. The U.S. share of global GDP -- a good proxy for power -- has fluctuated around a quarter or a fifth since the early 1900s, with the exception of a temporary spike after World War II before the other industrial great powers recovered from it. The Soviet Union never came anywhere near challenging American primacy, and neither did Japan.

But now we are told that China will catch up with the U.S. in a couple of decades and dominate the world in the "Asian century." Maybe, and then again, maybe not. Those projections depend on straight-line extrapolations of the incredibly high Chinese growth rates of the last decade. But there are a lot of problems with those projections that you seldom hear in awed discussions of the rise of China.

For one thing, as developing countries become developed countries, their initial high rates of growth slow down. Taking this into account pushes China's parity with the U.S. further into the future. And this assumes that China's high growth rates have been real. More and more experts are wondering whether those official growth rates can be trusted. It would not be the first time that a corrupt, authoritarian regime cooked the books. If China's growth figures have been inflated for a decade or two, then the Chinese economy may be smaller than many believe and the distance it has to travel to catch up with the U.S. is much greater.

And even optimistic projections only have China catching up with the U.S. in overall GDP, mainly because it will have a larger, but much poorer, population. Nobody expects China, even under the most favorable circumstances, to catch up with the U.S. and other developed countries in per capita income until the 22nd century, if then. And each of the rest of the "BRICs" (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is dwarfed by the U.S. in GDP.

But don't expect to read any of this in the newsmagazines or the Op-Ed columns. "Sleeping Dragon Wakes, World Trembles" or "South Asian Elephant Shakes World Order" make better headlines than "Even With High Growth, China and India Will Be Poor for Generations."

Hyperbolic assertions about America's meteoric rise or meteoric decline are not the only kind of hype that pollutes public discourse. Academics and journalistic pundits alike are fond of drawing attention to themselves by declaring that we are on the verge of a radical transformation of the system of sovereign states that has existed in Europe since the Thirty Years' War and in the world since post-World War II decolonization. Once again, we see the fallacy of the straight-line extrapolation from a temporary trend to a cosmic transformation.

In the 1990s, some misinterpreted the disintegration along ethnonational lines of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Instead of understanding these phenomena as what they were -- the long-delayed dissolution of remnants of the Romanov and Hapsburg empires -- these local breakups were said by some to augur the crackup of states everywhere.

During the Balkan wars in the mid-1990s, on a trip to war-ravaged Croatia, I sat on a plane next to an American businessmen who was reading a pop futurist book. "This book says that by the year 2000, there will be 3,000 nations in the U.N.," the businessman told me. When I expressed my skepticism, he evidently concluded that I didn't know what I was talking about and said little for the rest of the flight. As of 2009, mostly as a result of the Soviet and Yugoslav crackups, a couple of dozen new states have joined the international community since the end of the Cold War, but not a couple of thousand.

Others in the 1990s predicted not the exponential multiplication of states but the end of the state as such as the dominant actor in world politics. Robert Kaplan predicted "the coming anarchy" and many prophesied a neo-feudal world order in which stateless entities were more powerful than conventional states.

9/11 gave a brief boost to those who claimed that international terrorist organizations now rivaled states in their power, but in retrospect it was a fluke, not a trend. Since 9/11 the U.S. and other states, having heightened their security, have thwarted mass-casualty attacks, and jihadists have been limited to crude, smaller-scale violence like machine-gunning crowds and blowing up buses and trains. Contrary to popular belief, with the exception of jihadism and a few local wars of partition, political violence worldwide dramatically diminished after the Cold War and remains low compared to the Cold War years (in part because the U.S. and the Soviets stirred the pot of many local conflicts that mercifully fizzled out without external intervention).

And the international corporations that were supposed to be more powerful than countries? The poorest countries have to bargain with transnational enterprises and banks -- but that is nothing new. Not only giant but also medium-size countries still overmatch even the largest corporations and banks. And "global" firms turned out to be not so global. When the present economic crisis struck in 2008, allegedly transnational enterprises like banks and car companies went running for aid to their respective national governments. These global firms, from Deutsche Bank to General Motors, have always been deeply rooted in particular nation-states, notwithstanding their overseas subsidiaries and partners. True global capitalism is a myth spread by the likes of Thomas Friedman. In reality, we live in the era of multinational capitalism, not global capitalism.

While we are strolling down memory lane, remember all the chatter a few years back about how irresistible immigration flows were leading to a world with open borders for labor as well as goods and capital? One of the fads in universities in the 1990s was the claim that "diasporic consciousness" was leading to the replacement of national identity by post-national global multiculturalism.

Not hardly. The backlash against the economic and cultural problems associated with mass immigration has forced parties of the left as well as the right in Europe to crack down on illegal immigration and asylum seeking. In the last decade in the U.S., many Democratic politicians who face reelection, including President Obama, have switched from denouncing critics of illegal immigration as racists to boasting of the success of their efforts to control the borders and promising to exclude illegal immigrants from public healthcare plans. And from India and Saudi Arabia to America's Southwestern border, fences are going up, to keep out both terrorist infiltrators and the unwanted foreign poor.

Remember how national identity was supposed to wither away? Obama campaigned and now governs against a backdrop of multiple American flags, as though he were the head of the John Birch Society. In Britain, the Labour Party that touted the wonders of globalization and financial deregulation in the 1990s is now proposing citizenship tests for immigrants, assimilation and American-style civic patriotism or liberal nationalism. The nation-state is not withering away. Post-national globalism is withering away. To be more accurate, post-national globalism never really existed, except in the imaginations of pundits and professors and plutocrats who concluded that the nation-state was dead because they invested in China, bought their suits in London and watched French art films.

In the decade about to begin, it would be naive to expect an end to breathless hype about world politics. That sort of thing wins readers for journals and newspapers and makes the careers of pundits who aspire to bloviate at Davos before an audience of the trendy rich. Nevertheless, the appropriate response to claims that America is about to collapse or conquer the world, and to assertions that the nation-state system is about to give way to something entirely different -- global mafias, city-states, a new Caliphate, tribal empires, a cybernetic Singularity, whatever -- is a bored yawn.

That's not the only funny part of Obama's remarks, which you can watch below. (My personal favorite: "[A]s Mel Brooks explains it: 'Look at Jewish history -- unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So every 10 Jews, God designed one to be crazy and amuse the others.' According to Mel, 'By the time I was five I knew I was that one.'")

Unfortunately for Beck, Gingrich and all the others, their new favorite statistic appears to have little basis in fact.

The claim can be traced back to a Forbes.com column by Michael Cembalest entitled "Obama’s Business Blind Spot." In the article, Cembalest, the chief operating officer of J.P. Morgan Private Bank, presents his findings about the private-sector experience of certain Cabinet appointees -- those he thought most likely to weigh in on the job debate -- for every president since Theodore Roosevelt. The post happened to include a chart, which initially indicated that less than 10 percent of Obama’s appointees had business experience. Forbes.com subsequently altered the graph to show that more than 20 percent of Obama’s Cabinet members have a private-sector background -- but not before it had been gleefully reproduced, in it is original form, all over the right.

To the chagrin of Obama’s conservative opponents, even the adjusted figures are dubious. Excluding lawyers and consultants (as Cembalest did), three of the nine members of Obama’s Cabinet included in the study -- fully 33 percent -- do have private-sector experience. Energy Secretary Steven Chu worked at AT & T Bell Laboratories for nine years, ultimately as the head of their Quantum Electronics Research Department. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital, where he directed the corporation’s $1.5 billion of investments in affordable housing loans. Finally, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar -- on top of his work as Colorado attorney general and a U.S. senator -- was a partner in his family’s farm for over thirty years. Salazar and his wife have also owned and operated a number of small businesses, including a Dairy Queen and several radio stations.

Another three of Obama’s appointees -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke -- all spent part of their careers working as lawyers. And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner worked as a consultant at Kissinger Associates, a firm that advises international companies on economic and political conditions abroad.

By this count, seven out of these nine Obama appointees (or 78 percent) do have private-sector experience. Gingrich was only off by about 70 percentage points.

Even the original source of the claim is appalled by what it's become, and has been chastising himself for it. Cembalest told PolitiFact.com that his study was based on "some kind of completely, 100 percent subjective assessment of whether or not a person had had enough control of payroll, dealing with shareholders, hiring, firing and risk-taking that they’d be in a position to have had a meaningful seat at the table when the issue being discussed is job creation."

Bash Obama. That's the new style, the new tone. People have to vent their frustration. Disappointed lovers can be really bitchy.

The view that U.S. politics can't be anything but good and pure is one of the most beloved  clichés about the United States. But whenever reality scratches the idealized image of the U.S. as an exemplary guiding force in the world, there's a hail of criticism which is about as excessive as the messianic hopes that had been pinned to Obama. Superman Obama was expected to instantly erase 12 years of climate policy stagnation and immiediately catch up with Europe's effort to create a zero-pollution world. And because he couldn't accomplish all that in time, he's in trouble now.

But Obama is neither god nor king: He's a president. He may be the most powerful man in the world, but he is far from being the most powerful man in Washington. He lives in a country that adheres to the separation of powers and the principle of independent lawmakers. And there are special interests.

On the one side, there's the opposition that blocks anything Obama proposes -- regardless what it might be. Then there are the unions, always structurally conservative, who would rather save dying jobs than create new ones. Further, there are companies that view the unlimited burning of fossil fuels as a precondition for making profits.

Finally, there are also a number of states -- around 10 -- where all of these interests converge. The industrial makeup of these regions is similar to that of Poland, where the majority of electricity is derived from coal-fired plants. Should it be any wonder, then, that the favored environmental policies of these states is similar to those of Poland? Is it any surprise that elected Democratic officials from these regions harbor the same kind of positions one can still hear today in German labor organizations like the IG Metall metalworkers union?

In Germany, people like to see themselves as enlightened

Did anyone expect that it would be easy to burden companies and consumers in the U.S. with a bill totalling billions? In Germany, it's fashionable for people to consider themselves enlightened. They like to claim that they have a trading system for emissions, that air pollution is expensive and unprofitable in the long run. But a few words of caution are warranted. Germany's most important climate protection instrument is based on a European directive that had to be converted into national law. If members of the German parliament had been permitted a free debate and a free decision on the matter, they probably would have been put under the same kind of pressure and interests faced by their colleagues in the US today.

Thanks to Europe's democratic deficiency, they can now boast of their progressiveness. But even under these conditions, Germany sometimes runs out of breath. Take, for example, last year when the most recent version of the European Union's climate protection package was presented. It included a kind of subsidy program for the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Germany's "climate chancellor" no doubt had a role in that.

And even if Obama were to succeed in bewitching Congress tomorrow, his critics would still be far from pleased. After all, the draft legislation being considered there doesn't even come close to what those critics would like to see. They would claim that what Congress is currently debating is laughable.

But that depends entirely on the yardstick used to measure it. To catch up with Europe, the U.S. would have to accept the same emissions reductions targets as Europe for the year 2020. Because it is starting later, though, it would also require that those targets be implemented faster. More precisely: Twice as fast. It would be a Herculean endeavour. Put in other words: a chimera.

It would be fairer to compare what America and Europe plan to do in the future, once Congress has completed its legislative procedures. Then one could see that both continents are neck-and-neck in terms of climate policy, regardless what yardstick is used: costs, costs as a share of gross domestic product or the percentage reduction in emissions.

Obama's legislative backup plan

Among the most imaginative allegations against Obama are that the man isn't really interested in climate change, and that's why he is leaving the world in the lurch at Copenhagen. But just as a reminder: Shortly after his election, before he had taken office, Obama pledged that his government would shift America's course on climate change. In his economic stimulus package, $80 billion was directed toward green projects including improving the insulation of homes and the construction of modern power lines. Exhaust standards for cars were tightened. California's strict standards became the norm for the entire country, forcing European luxury carmakers to use more energy efficient motors in models sold on the American market than in Europe.

Under Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency has been given teeth again. In the event Congress fails to pass a climate bill, the agency is threatening to use regulatory avenues to introduce emissions trading.

If the climate bill fails, Obama plans to follow it up with an energy bill. And he appears to have a clear majority for it. The bill would include stricter emissions standards for power plants and stricter energy efficiency requirements for household appliances. Even without emissions trading, the measures add up to an impressive policy shift. Obama "did more in the first eight months of his term for climate protection than his predecessor did in eight years," wrote experts at the Green Party-aligned Heinrich Böll Foundation, not known for pussyfooting around when it comes to climate policy.

From day one, Obama has led his country back to the center of international climate diplomacy. The architecture of a future climate treaty is suddenly no longer contested between the trans-Atlantic partners. There is no longer any dissent over the scope of climate change and the threat it poses to mankind. There is also consensus on the view that all emissions sinners must do their part to reduce them as well as the opinion that industrialized countries must take the lead and provide support for developing nations.

Climate change is at the core of Obama's agenda

Obama has even put climate policies at the center of bilateral relations with India and China. In the meantime, he has also introduced an emissions cuts goal that US negotiators will take with them to Copenhagen. By doing so, the president is taking a risk domestically. During climate negotiations in Kyoto in 1997, the president also made a pledge that the Senate didn't want to back. For his part, Obama is now also relying on draft legislation whose passage isn't certain. He's doing so because he views climate protection as the core of his political agenda.

On Dec. 9, he will travel to Copenhagen to use his international prestige to try to make the conference a success. He will show the leadership the world expects of him. The Europeans have a choice: They can reconcile with Obama and, by doing so, increase the chances that a climate package will be approved by Congress. Or they can chide the U.S. for lacking ambition and thus risk a climate policy setback.

Either way, Obama has done all that was possible for a single person. He has become the greenest president his land has ever seen.

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff is the senior director for policy programs at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.