All these are long-term investments. “It may take five years. It may take 50 years,” Krepinevich said. “It some cases it may never materialize.”

In meantime, until new technologies mature and the economy recovers, the report calls for a strategic “holding action” along the lines of Nixon’s 1969 “Guam Doctrine.” Nixon’s most obvious strategic move was to withdraw from Vietnam, putting the burden of the war there on the South Vietnamese, much as Obama plans to make Afghanistan responsible for its own security after 2014, albeit with continued US support. (Congress cut off the aid Nixon had promised Saigon, sealing its fate in 1975; here’s hoping we and Kabul do better). But Nixon also sought to reduce the threat by reaching out to China, literally neutralizing a threat by turning an enemy power into a neutral one, and to the Soviet Union, negotiating arms control treaties (on which Moscow cheated).

Obama’s strategic guidance from this January does seek to limit our military commitments abroad and help allies to help themselves, both approaches Nixon would have approved. But the much-touted “Pivot to Asia” and the associated “AirSea Battle” concept are widely seen, including in Beijing, as pitting the US against a rising China; Nixon would have made nice, or even made concessions. Inflaming relations with a potential adversary is a good way to start an arms race, and the US can’t afford one — let alone a war.

That’s the lesson of another historical case study in the CSBA report, how Great Britain handled its relative decline prior to World War I. While the UK successfully sought allies and invested in new technologies, much as the US did in the seventies, it failed to defuse its conflict with Imperial Germany, a rising power with a prickly sense of national pride, a deep fear of foreign meddling, and an authoritarian government willing to divert domestic discontent onto foreign conflicts — much like China today. Ultimately it wasn’t economic decline or imperial overstretch that doomed Britain as a world power: It was two world wars. That’s a lesson for the US to heed today as well.