Another View on American Hegemony

I’ve just got a quick quote really for today. Joseph Nye, in his seminal work Soft Power, writes, “The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally. On the top board of classic interstate military issues, the United States is indeed the only superpower with global military reach, and it makes sense to speak in traditional terms of unipolarity or hegemony. However, on the middle board of interstate economic issues, the distribution of power is multipolar. The United States cannot obtain the outcomes it wants on trade, antitrust, or financial regulation issues without the agreement of the European Union, Japan, China, and others. It makes little sense to call this American hegemony. And on the bottom board of transnational issues like terrorism, international crime, climate change, and the spread of infectious diseases, power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and nonstate actors. It makes no sense at all to call this a unipolar world or an American empire–despite claims of propagandists on the right and left.” While the title of this blog probably makes it clear that I believe firmly in American hegemony, it seems appropriate to share other well-rationed views. The analogy blew my mind.

Tagged as: Hegemony