"It's election season again, and the main contenders for the Oval Office are knocking themselves out to reassure Americans that their nation remains at the pinnacle of the global pecking order," Charles A. Kupchan writes in Sunday Review of The New York Times. Not to be outdone, President Obama insisted in his State of the Union address that "anyone who tells you that America is in decline" doesn't "know what they're talking about," Mr. Kupchan writes. "Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama might overdo it a bit, but they're actually not far off the mark," he writes. "Despite two draining wars, sluggish growth and a diffusion of power from the West to China and the "rising rest," a combination of economic resilience and military superiority will keep the United States at or near the top for decades." Still, they're missing the point, he writes. True, rising powers like India and Brazil are stable, secular democracies that appear to be hewing closely to the Western model. But these countries have democratized while their populations consist mainly of the urban and rural poor, not the middle class. As a result, both nations have embraced a left-wing populism wary of free markets and of representative institutions that seem to deliver benefits only to a privileged elite. Rising democracies are also following their own paths on foreign policy, foiling America's effort to turn India into a strategic partner. New Delhi is at odds with Washington on issues ranging from Afghanistan to climate change, and it is deepening commercial ties with Iran just as America is tightening sanctions. Standing up to America still holds cachet in India and Brazil, one reason New Delhi and Brasília line up with Washington less than 25 percent of the time at the United Nations. Washington has long presumed that the world's democracies will as a matter of course ally themselves with the United States; common values supposedly mean common interests. But if India and Brazil are any indication, even rising powers that are stable democracies will chart their own courses, expediting the arrival of a world that no longer plays by Western rules.