American Gotterdamerung is a perennial pundit's game.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSEWATCH - National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025

It appears that on any given day in Washington, as of late, someone is unveiling a book, releasing a study, giving a presentation or briefing foreign-policy wonks about the impending demise of America as we know it. These are indeed boom times for "declinist" literature.

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They are all variations of the same theme: The world is becoming multipolar, America's era of supremacy is over, there will be new players and new rules in the global power game.

Lending credibility to this worldview was the November 2008 report by the National Intelligence Council, "Global Trends 2025," which predicts that the U.S.-dominated international system that emerged following World War II will be revolutionized. It also foresees an unprecedented transfer of wealth from West to East, and the rise of the BRIC's (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as legitimate new disruptors of the global balance of power. It foresees that gaps in national influence will continue to narrow between developed and developing countries.

The NIC's judgment was seen inside the Beltway as a sign of impending downfall. But contrarians are now pushing back, arguing that the national intelligence analysts missed the mark, that they were overly influenced by the disheartening course of events in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the September 2008 U.S. economic meltdown, and that they failed to take a broader look at historical trends.

Not surprisingly, the combination of an economic downturn and the authoritative imprimatur of an NIC report predicting America's decline became "congealed into a conventional wisdom very quickly," said Eric S. Edelman, former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey, who also served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the George W Bush administration.

Edelman last month unveiled a counterview to the NIC study, "Understanding America's Contested Primacy," published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank in Washington, D.C.

At a briefing on Capitol Hill, Edelman cautioned that much of what is in Global Trends 2025 is accurate analysis. But he questioned why the NIC in 2008 painted such a drastically different picture from the one laid out in its 2004 report, "Mapping the Global Future 2020," which had concluded that the era of unipolarity and U.S. primacy was likely to continue for as far as the eye could see, Edelman said.

"What was it that changed so dramatically between 2004 and 2008 that would...