The global world order is locked in---US primacy only contributes to disorder

In that spirit, contemporary conceivablists worry that a minimally armed United States would suffer a hugely damaging decline in “influence” and would become less able to order the world—to be the “American Pacifier” with “leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action.” They speculate that Europe “might” become “incapable of securing itself from various threats” materializing from somewhere or other, and that this “could be destabilizing within the region and beyond” while making the Europeans potentially “vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers.” They also worry that Israel, Egypt, and/or Saudi Arabia might do something nutty in the Middle East and that Japan and South Korea might get nuclear weapons.143

The United States can certainly take credit for being an important influence in establishing a Western order in which the losers of the Second World War came to view the world in much the same way as those who had bombed Dresden and Hiroshima, emerging as key contributors to that order in the process. This was one of the most impressive instances of enlightened self-interest in history. However, the United States hardly forced that to happen due to its hegemonic (or limited hegemonic) status. It may have nudged, persuaded, and encouraged the process to move along, but it had a highly responsive audience in devastated peoples who were most ready to embrace the message and to get back on the road to prosperity. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that the United States was not strictly necessary for these developments at all—that much the same thing would have happened if it had never existed or if it had retreated into truculent isolationism.

Over the course of the decades, the U.S. has provided added value to the international order at various points. But, as Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow forcefully point out, it has also routinely embraced error and engaged in fiasco. For example, it “grossly exaggerated” the threat presented by the Soviet Union; promulgated and then wallowed mindlessly and parochially in messianism and in such self-infatuated characterizations as “exceptionalism” and “indispensability”; bullied other countries self-defeatingly; reneged on its own liberal trading rules; and has often been “unable to impose solutions consistent with hegemony.”144

They also point out that American efforts to manage the Middle East, as with Vietnam in the 1960s, have been “a primary source of disorder,” noting particularly that “since 9/11, the United States is arguably in the grip of the same kind of paranoia as in the early years of the Cold War.”145 The tragedy here is that, although France tried hard in the 2003 runup to the disastrous Iraq War, America’s allies were unable to pacify the Pacifier (or chief primate).

As this discussion suggests, such concepts as hegemony and primacy, no matter how enthusiastically enshrined in the international relations literature, seem at best unhelpful and at worst spooky, vapid, distracting, and misdirecting. Sorting through various definitions, Reich and Lebow array several that seem to capture the essence of hegemony: controlling leadership, domination, or the ability to shape international rules according to the hegemon’s own interests. “Hegemony,” then, is an extreme word suggesting supremacy, mastery, preponderant influence, and full control. Hegemons force others to bend to their will whether they like it or not.146

Moreover, insofar as they carry meaning, the militarized application of American “primacy” and “hegemony” to “order” the world has often been a fiasco.147 Indeed, it is impressive that the “hegemon,” endowed by definition by what Reich and Lebow aptly call a “grossly disproportionate” military capacity has had such a miserable record of achievement since 1945—an issue discussed earlier in this paper. 148 In the meantime, it might be noted again that the US (and a large number of other developed countries) remained studiously distant from genocide in Cambodia in 1975-79 and Rwanda in 1994 and from catastrophic civil war in Congo after 1997.149

In the wake of foreign policy debacle in the Middle East, there are signs suggesting the hegemonic delusion may have been played out. Although fully two-thirds of Americans continue to favor greater US involvement in the global economy in 2013, only 46 percent deem it “very desirable” for the United States to exert strong leadership in world affairs—the lowest level ever registered by the poll question. (In the same poll, only 11 percent of Europeans said they felt that way: the “dominated,” it would appear, do not seem to have gotten the message.)150

The American people do not want to be disconnected, but they are fully able to contain their enthusiasm for being drawn into costly foreign disasters by a foreign policy establishment deluded with visions of hegemony and determined to look like it is exerting strong leadership in world affairs while remaining blissfully incapable of frankly examining the full scope of the disasters it has already perpetrated. In a speech at West Point in 2014, President Barack Obama contended that the question we face “is not whether America will lead but how we will lead.”151 Perhaps the American (and European) people can be forgiven for worrying about the results.

Reich and Lebow argue that “it is incumbent on IR scholars to cut themselves loose” from the concept of hegemony.152 It seems even more important for the foreign policy establishment to do so. After that, maybe we can happily abandon other scholarly concepts that are often vacuous, usually misdirecting, and singularly unhelpful. These would include not only concepts like “hegemony” and “primacy,” but also “polarity,” “system,” “power transition,” and, eventually perhaps, “power” itself.153