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The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the financial crisis of 2007-09. The country was dominant in many domains of power—military, economic, political and cultural. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it hoped to remake not just Iraq and Afghanistan (invaded two years before), but the whole Middle East. America overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about deep political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and a financial crisis that accentuated the inequalities American-led globalisation had brought about.

Termites in the floorboards

After the United States moved from the darkness of the Cold War into the pleasant glow of the so-called unipolar moment, a diverse array of scholars, pundits, and world leaders began predicting, yearning for, or actively seeking a return to a multipolar world. Not surprisingly, Russian and Chinese leaders have long expressed a desire for a more multipolar order, as have the leaders of emerging powers such as India or Brazil. More interestingly, so have important U.S. allies. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder warned of the "undeniable danger" of U.S. unilateralism, and former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine once declared that "the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one." Current French President Emmanuel Macron's support for European unity and strategic autonomy reveals a similar impulse.

Surprise, surprise: U.S. leaders don't agree. They prefer the expansive opportunities and gratifying status that come from being the indispensable power, and they have been loath to abandon a position of unchallenged primacy. Back in 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration prepared a defense guidance document calling for active efforts to prevent the emergence of peer competitors anywhere in the world. The various National Security Strategy documents issued by Republicans and Democrats in subsequent years have all extolled the need to maintain U.S. primacy, even when they acknowledge the return of great power competition. Prominent academics have weighed in too—some arguing that U.S. primacy is "essential to the future of freedom," and good for the United States and the world alike. I've contributed to this view myself, writing in 2005 that "the central aim of U.S. grand strategy should be to preserve its position of primacy for as long as possible." (My advice on how to achieve that goal was ignored, however.)

According to Oxford historian Peter Frankopan, we are witnessing the unravelling of the global order. In a period of history marked by a Western financial crisis, a global coronavirus pandemic, war in Europe, rising government debt and political instability across advanced democracies, the Western era is winding down. Indeed, the global order has been steadily moving toward a “post-American World” or “post-Western World” for some time. At the heart of this shift is the rise of China and the emergence of a multipolar system.

While we have grown used to thinking of globalization in terms of liberal democracy and Western-led multilateralism, globalization within a multipolar order will increasingly favour regional autonomy and a struggle to define a new balance of power. Taken together, China, India, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Brazil are becoming regional powers within a loosely coupled global system.

Realism contends that whenever the world or part of it exhibits multipolarity, balance of power equation kicks in. Rise of China, Russia, India, and EU have brought back balance of power dynamics back into the global system and the United States needs an appropriate response to it. Quite clearly in a multipolar world, hegemonic grand strategy is untenable for America when the distribution of power has spread to so many poles. For Washington, it must make the distinction of friends and foes between these rising poles. There is now a bipartisan view in the United States about China and Russia being the challengers that Washington must manage. With that in mind, since the beginning of Donald Trump presidency, there has been a discernible sign that the United States is trying to bring back the idea of balance in its grand strategy. Trump presidency and now the Biden presidency have actively sought to build countervailing regional groups like QUAD and AUKUS to balance China in the Indo-Pacific Region. The leadership role taken by Washington in the formation of these groups is a clear indication that the United States is beginning to respond appropriately to the dynamics of balance of power which has now been activated in the Indo-Pacific with the rise of China. Washington needs to further build on these initiatives by completely abandoning hegemony and adopting a grand strategy of balance with the intention of raising the defensive capabilities of its treaty allies and its strategic partners in Asia to counterbalance China. With a shift from hegemony to balance in its grand strategy, America can insulate herself from the drawback of its overarching shadow among other rising nations, which inevitably also insulates her from entering a Thucydides’s Trap with China. At the same time, America would reserve the right to maintain a defensive posture of proportionate retaliation for any attempt to threaten her relative position in the world.

These statements point to the emergence of a new non-alignment within the Global South, a counterpoint to America’s typical posture of world leadership. Of course, these are not popular views in Washington, but that is precisely the point — if prominent leaders in the fastest growing regions don’t buy into the Western consensus, can the United States really maintain its global position for long?

Despite the National Security Strategy’s recent declaration that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over,” the United States is still unwilling to state what the international system has become in its wake: increasingly multipolar.

Thomas Meisenhelder, "Declining American Hegemony Could Be A Good Thing," Common Dreams, 10-11-2020, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/11/declining-american-hegemony-could-be-good-thing-- 嘉玮

We are told that the United States is the greatest, most productive and fairest economy in the world. It isn't. Over the last several years, our share of world production has declined significantly. Increasingly our economy is characterized by wide inequalities, environmental destruction, and decreasing life chances for the many. The earnings ratio between CEOs and their employees has widened dramatically. Bosses now earn as much as 400 times the incomes of their employees. Ordinary Americans no longer believe that future generations will have more comfortable lives than current ones. People of color in the United States face significant economic damage just because of their heritage and ethnicity.

Andrew J. Bacevich, "The Reckoning That Wasn’t," Foreign Affairs, 2-28-2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/andrew-bacevich-the-reckoning-that-wasnt-america-hegemony-- 嘉玮

The disappointing outcomes of the protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should have sounded a wake-up call akin to the one experienced by the United Kingdom in 1956, after the British government orchestrated an intervention to reassert its control of the Suez Canal and, more broadly, put Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in his place. The ensuing debacle resulted in a singular humiliation that cost British Prime Minister Anthony Eden his job. Eden’s rival, British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, described the Suez operation as “an act of disastrous folly” that did “irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country.” Few observers disputed that judgment. The crisis obliged the British to acknowledge that their imperial project had reached a dead end. The old way of doing things—whipping weaker peoples into line—was no longer going to work.

By virtue of the Hegemonic Stability Theory, the hegemon is an important element in creation and maintenance of the international system. As stated earlier, open trade benefits all participants, even the rising challengers that are accommodated in the system. In contemporary world politics, China is the fastest rising power and it is also reaping the benefits of the open economic order created by the US. By participating in the globalized economy, China has earned a comparative advantage in labor-market and its economy has been growing. On top of that China is an export-based economy and thus, it has very little incentive to jeopardize this benefit by engaging with the hegemon and thereby disrupting the order. In his article, Artur Stein has argued that decline in hegemony does not bring about a complete collapse of the trade regime as long as hegemonic power is committed to economic openness. Taking these two points in consideration, it can be argued that it is not in the interest of China to challenge US hegemony. On account, likelihood of war is averted. [5]

Robert Keohane and Institutionalist Approach In After Hegemony, Robert Keohane uses an institutional approach to explain inter-state cooperation. He posits that states have common interest and in order to realize it requires achieving mutually beneficial agreements which is where international regimes come in. These regimes foster cooperation by making it easier to reach mutually beneficial inter-state agreements. They help overcome the problem of lack of qualitative and asymmetrical information, through institutional embeddedness reduces transaction costs, legal costs reduce incentive to cheat thereby reducing uncertainty and building confidence among states. Since hegemonic leadership is required to create regimes in the first place, even after the erosion of hegemony, they have high stakes and play important role in fostering cooperation (US role in the IMF and WTO). Because cooperation fosters absolute gain, all participants are benefitted. [6] By this approach, states see cooperation more beneficial than conflict. Thus, it can be argued from institutionalist approach that international regimes foster cooperation thereby reducing likelihood of conflict in the event of hegemonic decline.

The commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, testified to Congress in April 2021 that the United States might well face a two-front or even a three-front war if Russia were to invade Ukraine and/or other Eastern Europe nations, China were to attack Taiwan, and North Korea were to attack South Korea simultaneously and in coordination. Adm. Richard testified that the United States currently has no contingency plans for how to confront two allied nuclear superpowers in a future war. Thus, the ability of the United States and its allies to survive, let alone win, a war fought with such powerful, unconventional weapons against our enemies remains very much in doubt.

In a recent article in the National Interest, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs A. Wess Mitchell expanded upon this increasing danger warning that:

Xi likely also sees the benefit of Russia distracting America’s strategic focus away from China. Neither Beijing nor Moscow can deal with the United States and its partners on its own; they both would rather stand together to deal with external pressure than face it alone. Given China’s dependence on imports for food and fuel, Xi likely also values the secure and discounted supplies of these critical inputs that Russia provides.

“The PRC presents the most consequential and systemic challenge, while Russia poses acute threats — both to vital U.S. national interests abroad and to the homeland,” the NDS says of the People’s Republic of China.

The document is deficient, however, in understating the extent to which China-Russia collaboration compounds the threat that either poses by itself. It is entirely silent on the emerging security alliance being forged by the two U.S. adversaries.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine, Russia and China are now closer allies than at any time in the two countries’ modern history. As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Moscow in March highlighted, Russian President Vladimir Putin has found a strong partner in his declared struggle against the West – such a strong partner, in fact, that Russia has been relegated to junior status in the relationship. Yet that is a price President Putin is willing to pay in order to secure access to the resources he needs to sustain his regime and his unprovoked aggression in Ukraine. The relationship also suits President Xi well. As he prepares China for a long-term conflict with the United States and its allies, Russia offers him assets he can’t get anywhere else: modern weapons, cheap oil and gas, support in the UN Security Council, and the ability to distract the United States by causing trouble in many corners of the world.

China and Russia are taking center stage this week as both countries look to deepen ties just as a chasm with the West, on a geopolitical and economic as well as military front, appears to be getting deeper, according to analysts.

A three-day state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Moscow this week, which began Monday, was hailed by China and Russia’s presidents as the result of solid and cooperative relations between the two leaders and their respective nations, and comes after a determined drive over the last decade to strengthen diplomatic, defense and trade ties.

Moreover, even though both Russia and China claimed that nothing they were doing was directed against any ‘third party’, implicitly it would be possible. As both made clear in 1997, while insisting they were not hostile to the US—China after all needed US support to join the World Trade Organization—they were determined to move the world away from a unipolar system, which did not suit their interests, towards a ‘multipolar’ order which did; Putin made this point clearer still ten years later, in a famous speech delivered in Munich. As Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared at one of his long meetings with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, there were some (unnamed) powers who were pushing for a world with one centre. This was simply unacceptable to either Russia or China, who from now on would be working together to create a ‘new world order…with several focal points’.16

In of itself, this may not have led to conflict with the United States and the West. Nothing was set in stone. However, as soon became clear, unipolarity was not just a theoretical construct but created conditions on the ground which allowed the US to act with a degree of impunity without much fear of the consequences. How else, according to policymakers in both Russia and China, could one explain the many unilateral decisions taken by the US, from the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, through NATO’s continuing war against Russia’s ally Serbia, and finally—and most importantly, according to Putin writing on the eve of his war against Ukraine—to Bush’s war against Iraq in 2003? These were not accidents of history in their view, but rather expressions of an underlying power imbalance in the wider international system. Some in the West may have insisted that unipolarity engendered stability. Others insist that it did not really matter This, however, was not the view in either Beijing or Moscow.

While Washington takes a wait-and-see approach, Moscow and Beijing could be coordinating to significantly thwart U.S. interests over the next 15 to 25 years. The two powers may never forge a formal military alliance, but they could still work together in ways that cause major headaches for the United States. Imagine, for example, that Russia and China coordinate the timing of hostile actions on their peripheries. If China made aggressive moves in support of its sovereignty claim in the South China Sea at the same time that Russia made further incursions into Ukraine, U.S. forces would struggle to respond effectively to either gambit.

Nonmilitary collaboration between Russia and China could weaken the United States and even threaten its way of life. Both countries are likely to use their cyber and disinformation capabilities to, as the director of national intelligence put it in January, “steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.” China currently does not exhibit Russia’s zeal for using such measures, particularly against the United States; but if U.S.-Chinese relations darken, Beijing could plausibly take a page from Russia’s playbook and mount coordinated, deniable cyberattacks or interference campaigns against the United States.

Meanwhile, the United States has engaged in several unnecessarily provocative actions with regards to Russia and China over the past few years which has caused them to ally more closely together against us, greatly increasing the risk that the United States will face a simultaneous two-front war with Russia in Europe and with China in the South China Sea. The United States has sent warships to contest Russian dominance of the Baltic and Black Seas and sent a U.S. carrier battle group to the South China Sea for naval exercises immediately following a major Chinese naval exercise near Taiwan. U.S. leaders have also sent troops into the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania while permanently stationing troops in Poland. They have also inserted U.S. ground forces into Syria, a Russian-proxy state, where Russian military vehicles collided with US military vehicles as they passed by each other.

Most disturbingly, the United States has even sent military trainers and lethal military aid to Ukraine to help it wage its ongoing low-intensity war with Russia, risking the outbreak of a major war between the United States and Russia. If the United States continues its high-risk policy of military brinkmanship with Russia and China, the outcome, however unthinkable, might be an Armageddon that results in the end of our nation. Instead, rather than attempting to challenge and contain Russia and China along their borders and coastal seas, the United States should pursue some limited accommodations of their vital interests either by diplomacy or unilateral actions. In my next article, I will discuss a new, forward-thinking proposed U.S. national security strategy that has the potential to divide and disrupt the Sino-Russian military alliance and ensure our national survival.

Neorealists believe that grand strategies, among other things, result from systemic factors like distribution of power in the international system.39 They say in the current multipolar world where new powers are rising, a hegemonic strategy will unnecessarily provoke rising powers. Christopher Layne and other influential realists like J. J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt propose ‘offshore balancing’ as an alternative grand strategy to hegemony, suitable for a multipolar world that will effectively counter China’s rise. Under offshore balancing, America would offer support to alliances and allies–through diplomatic, military, and intelligence channels–to counterbalance China. In this way, it can shift burdens of security to other countries (buck passing).40 Buck passing would reduce headlong confrontation between Washington and Beijing, as the former assumes the role of a buck passer and remains on the side-line, only to use local powers to contain its rival. Rather than maintaining an overwhelming power everywhere to check rival powers by itself, offshore balancing aims to preserve ruling power’s strength and dominance by containing rising power with regional security architecture, created out of favorable regional allies or powers.41 Hence, rather than fear multipolarity, offshore balancing strategy embraces it. Offshore balancing accepts that the United States cannot stop the rise of new powers, either among American allies and Strategic partners (the EU, India, Japan, Indonesia) or outside it (China, Russia, Iran). At the same time, offshore balancing allows United States the right to protect and promote its interest by balancing Beijing with regional allies. These arguments make a strong case for the adoption of an offshore balancing strategy by the United States to reduce risks with China that has the potential to insulate her from future great wars with Beijing and maximize her relative power position in the international system. Offshore balancing, in other words, has the potential to offset the Thucydides’s Trap.

Thomas Meisenhelder, "Declining American Hegemony Could Be A Good Thing," Common Dreams, 10-11-2020, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/11/declining-american-hegemony-could-be-good-thing-- 嘉玮

Much of the U. S. hegemony has stemmed from the fact that the United States is surely the most heavily armed and most militarily active country in the world. The national myth is that we use military force reluctantly and only when it is necessary to insure human rights, peace, and security. But let's look at the record: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Cuba, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Chile, Central America, Libya, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan. Are any of these places were made better as a consequences of our covert and overt actions? We spend more on weapons of war than any other country in the world. Researchers at Brown University have found that since the horror of 9/11, the so-called "war on terrorism" has killed 800,000, displaced 37,000,000, and cost taxpayers $6.4 trillion.

Carnelos 21- former Italian diplomat who served in the foreign policy staff of three Italian prime ministers between 1995 and 2011.

Marco Carnelos, "America's exceptionalism will ultimately be its downfall," Middle East Eye, 9-13-2021, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/america-exceptionalism-ultimately-downfall-- 嘉玮

Covell Meyskens, "China Is Pushing Disengagement With the United States Hard," Foreign Policy, 11-14-2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/08/china-disengagement-america-cold-war/-- 嘉玮

The Trump administration’s confrontational handling of international institutions and Washington’s partners buttressed the CCP’s view that China’s chance to act as a global leader had arrived—and that Beijing had to be more assertive in shaping global discourse, as Trump’s team made restraining China’s rise a top foreign-policy objective. The Biden administration’s sustained pressure on Beijing reinforced the CCP’s determination to convince audiences both in and outside China that, as a recent Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs report declared, U.S. hegemony is a danger to the world. Chinese state media argues that the solution to the U.S. threat to international stability and security is the PRC—which putatively has no intention of using its growing power to dominate or destabilize other countries, but rather strives to realize “the shared interests of mankind” and advance “peaceful development” worldwide.