Matthew Yglesias sums up some interesting thoughts about the Parag Khanna New York Times Magazine piece on America's sunsetting hegemony we discussed earlier this week.

Yglesias admits to seeing a lot he likes in Khanna's analysis. He adds some interesting caveats about the periodic passing interest in the creation of America-in-decline stories:

What happens, I think, is that whenever the United States makes policy blunders such as Vietnam or Iraq, the fact that hegemony has been slowly slipping through our fingertips for decades suddenly becomes apparent. But we're still the most important country out there, our economy's still growing in absolute terms, and when our country implements sound policies the whole issue fades into the background.

The question, I guess, is why not? Why is it so difficult for big media outlets to ask readers or listeners or viewers to take a look at America as something other than the center of the entire known universe? My complaints about Khanna's piece were that it lacked substance in the policy prescriptions for addressing the author's vision of America's decline. Perhaps it is the very all-problem/no-solutions quandary that scares editors and producers away from these issues. If so, the fix is self-evident.

My instincts, however, tell me that the real issue is one of perception. In the view of many media gatekeepers, these problems seem so big and un-containable that they fear the public will be dazed or turned off by hearing about them. (Domestic issues of such ungainly magnitude -- say what to do about America's schools or the crippling partisanship in Washington -- are frequently referred to but rarely analyzed. Only one or two global issues at a time, like war in Iraq, or for a short time late last year Pakistan, receive the benefit of this insider shorthand.)

The result, of course, is an America that has less and less of an appetite and an acumen for delving into global issues that do, in fact, affect them and their country's future. And instead of digging in where these issues matter -- for instance, in the unfolding presidential contest -- we get distracted.

And with that, I get to type words I never thought I would: Ron Paul is making sense. Here's Dr. Rep. Paul (R-bottom tier) from last night's GOP debate, noting that Senator McCain and former Governor Romney were splitting hairs in the only foreign policy item getting attention in this year's campaign, Iraq:

They agreed with going in; they agreed for staying, agreed for staying how many years? And these are technicalities. We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policemen of the world, whether we should be running our empire or not, and how are going to have guns and butter?