The Wall Has Fallen

In the film Good Bye Lenin!, an East Berlin mother has a heart attackand falls into a coma. When she revives, many months later, the BerlinWall has fallen and East Germany is history. The children want tobring her back to their apartment but the doctors are reluctant to let herleave the hospital, as any shock could trigger another infarction. Thechildren promise to provide as unthreatening an environment as possible;they conspire to prevent their mother, who was content underthe communist regime, from learning about its demise. They go to increasinglengths to establish and maintain this conceit; they removetheir new furniture and return their apartment to the way it once was,scour the city for the old brand of pickles she loved and have a friendproduce news programs that purport to be from the now defunct GermanDemocratic Republic. Once, by mistake, real television news fillsthe screen and the mother watches old clips of the Berlin Wall beingbreached. She becomes agitated, but is reassured by her children thatwhile this is true, it is Westerners who have broken through the Wall toseek asylum in the East. Suitably reassured, the mother insists that it istheir patriotic duty to take in some Western refugees. Word about themake-believe apartment gets around, and elderly people, unable toadapt to change, come around to enjoy its anachronistic ambience andreinforce one another's nostalgia for the old life. Their rosy reminiscencesbear little relationship to former realities.

International relations scholars responsible for the burgeoning literatureon hegemonic decline are like the elderly visitors in Good Bye Lenin!.They are unreconciled to change and nostalgic for a world that is longsince gone. Their memories of its glories are just as distorted. Moretroubling still, some scholars and many policy makers and their advisersmore closely resemble the poor mother. They believe they live in aworld in which America is still the hegemon and are convinced of itsmanifold advantages to themselves and everyone else. Analogous tothe mother, they engage in sterile debates among themselves aboutwhat can be done to preserve American dominance.

What is hegemony? The definition and consequence is a source ofgreat debate among liberals and realists. Michael Doyle understands itto mean "controlling leadership of the international system as a whole."Michael Mastanduno contends that hegemony exists when one politicalunit has the "power to shape the rules of international politics accordingto its own interests." Stuart Kaufman, Richard Little, and WilliamWohlforth describe hierarchy, which they all but equate with hegemony,as the political-military "domination" of a single unit "over most of theinternational system." John Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan insist thatsuch influence ultimately rests on material power, and "it is most effectivelyexercised when a hegemon is able to establish a set of normsthat others willingly embrace."

In reality, American hegemony was short-lived and a feature of thecountry's extraordinary economic primacy in the mid-twentieth centuryin a world devastated by history's costliest and most destructivewar. At the time, relatively few welcomed American hegemony as asource of political stability and economic reconstruction. Certainly, therapid comeback of Western Europe and Japan, and later the economicdevelopment of the Pacific Rim, were greatly assisted by American aid,loans, and markets. Yet, success made hegemony superfluous andCharles Kindleberger posited that hegemony had run its course by1963, and was certainly history by the 1970s. Americans neverthelessconvinced themselves that their hegemony was alive and well—andbenign. Given the Soviet threat, which policy makers, think tank analysts,and scholars grossly exaggerated, American hegemony was alsodescribed as in the common Western interest. Following the Cold Warand the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States remained "theindispensable nation," in the words of former secretary of state MadeleineAlbright. President Barack Obama would say something similarin a presidential debate prior to his reelection.

Power versus Influence

American hegemony eroded during the postwar decades as other nationsregained their economic strength and political stability. Of equalimportance, the postwar world witnessed movements and developmentsover which the United States could exert little to no control, suchas Third World nationalism and the rise of China. Efforts by Washingtonto maintain a puppet regime in South Vietnam and futile efforts to blockBeijing from taking China's seat in the UN Security Council darkenedAmerica's image and publicized its impotence. The decline of the dollaraccelerated this trend. Yet American foreign policy still embraces hegemonyand has not effectively adjusted to the reality. It is an unrealisticand counterproductive aspiration. The glaring discrepancy betweenAmerica's self-image and goals on the one hand, and others' perceptionof them, may explain one of the principal anomalies of contemporaryinternational relations (IR): the extraordinary military and economic powerof the United States and its increasing inability to get other states to do what itwants. Examples of this phenomenon abound. In Iraq, the administrationof President George W. Bush claimed to have created "a coalition ofthe willing," but in practice, the intervention was opposed by some ofAmerica's closest allies and the support of lesser states had to be purchased.In trade, the United States sought a critical Group of Twenty(G20) consensus on how to manage the Great Recession of 2008, only tobe rebuffed by Asians and Europeans alike. In this book we will showhow American attempts to shape and manage globalization, the principaleconomic development of the current age, have also failed.

To quote Alice, our story becomes "curiouser and curiouser." AlthoughAmerican hegemony has not existed for some time, prominentAmerican IR scholars believe it does, but periodically worry that it isabout to disappear. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Charles Krauthammerfamously proclaimed that the long-awaited "unipolar moment"had arrived. Like-minded realists predicted that American hegemonywould remain unchallenged for decades to come. Other realistsbegan worrying about immediate threats. George Friedman, who runsStratfor, a respected and widely read realist-oriented newsletter, predicateda war in the near future with Japan. Realists are still dividedamong themselves. Michael Mandelbaum, among others, thinks it essentialthat the United States cut back on its foreign policy commitments,but that this will result in greater disorder, leading other countriesto look back with nostalgia on American hegemony. Moreoptimistic realists like William Wohlforth contend that America canfinesse this transition and remain dominant. For most realists, the keyquestion is how the US will face the expected challenge from a...