Does 2017 mark the end of “American hegemony”, as claimed by John Schindler at Observer?
The United States has been the world’s greatest power since 1945, when that mantle—half-passed from London to Washington after the First World War—firmly landed in American hands after the Second World War. Since 1991, when the Cold War ended with Soviet collapse, America has been the world’s hegemon, to use the proper term, the force whose power could not be seriously challenged on the global stage.
For 26 years now—a happy generation—America has been able to do whatever it wanted, to anyone, at any time of our choosing, anywhere on earth. Notwithstanding the decline of major sectors of the American economy, our military has covered the globe with deployments as the Pentagon has divided our planet into “geographic combatant commands†to formalize our hegemony. Our allegedly deep defense thinkers have hailed this as our viceroys enacting Washington’s benevolent imperial will anywhere we desire.
I think I would have marked 1965 as the end of whatever hegemony the United States has possessed.
I’d like to see Mr. Schindler’s explanations of
- North Korea’s nuclear weapons development program
- The Chechen wars
- The rise of China (almost all of which has taken place during our supposed hegemony)
- The conflict in Syria
- Leaving Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq at the end of the Gulf War
- The two terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
in the context of American hegemony. Maybe hegemony ain’t what it used to be.
IR types have termed the current state of US dominance “hegemony” for some time now but I agree that it’s a misnomer. We’ve certainly been the predominant military and economic power since WWII but we’re not a true hegemon.
I think it’s a matter of perspective. The National Security establishment has acted as if the US was a Hegemon since the end of the Cold War. Reality had other ideas.
I am 74. I would say that America’s peak relative power was 1965, and our relative power declined slowly thereafter. It seemed to increase after thw fall of the USSR, but that fall only revealed the true situation, and it did not represent a real change. Over the last quarter century, our relative power has continued to decline, and now our adversaries have local superiority in their own neighborhoods. It is very telling that we could not defeat Muslim militias anywhere. We’ve been fighting in Somalia since 1992, to no avail. The use of the $314M MOAB last year against two or three dozen ISIS militiamen was an act of desperation, if not despair.
I think you need to define hegemony. I don’t see a hegemon as necessarily having total power over everything. Even the Roman Empire had uprisings it needed to put down when it was at its peak. Given that the USSR still existed in 1965, and we just kind of had our butts handed to us in Korea, I would say that we were the unchallenged military superpower until fairly recently, and probably ares till now in many ways. We just aren’t especially good at these asymmetrical, small wars where we aren’t fighting nation-states. We actually blew away Iraq as a nation-state pretty quickly, it was the occupation and fighting against insurgents where we failed. However, I think that is at least partially because ewe don’t really have the will to behave as true hegemon. We don’t occupy with the intent to rule.
Steve
Or the intent to stay. I agree with that. Those were among the reasons I used in arguing against our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I was pooh-poohed.