Hegemony is key to global stability and peace – multipolarity breaks down international order through overlapping spheres of influence,

Despite the reasons for optimism, there are better reasons for pessimism. History provides ample reasons for why Latin America would resent U.S. hegemony. Nevertheless, there is significant evidence that American hegemony acted as a powerful booster for international security and stability.8 Beginning with economic historian Charles Kindleberger, a wide range of international relations theorists have posited that a liberal hegemon is a necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of an open global economic order.9 In a unipolar system, the lone superpower can provide an array of public goods in exchange for the cooperation of other states.10 Dartmouth professor William Wohlforth has made the strongest set of theoretical arguments for this position during the post-Cold War era. He argues, contra balance-of-power theorists, that unipolarity is the most stable and peaceful of all possible international systems because it eliminates unproductive great power rivalries.11 The post-Cold War era offers strong evidence for reduced security rivalries and greater stability in a hegemonic world order. The Human Security Report Project has tracked a marked and secular decline in interstate violence since the end of the Cold War.12 There has been a further decline in other forms of violence, such as civil war and extrajudicial killings. Consistent with the logic of hegemony, global military expenditures declined dramatically following the end of the Cold War. Global expenditures on defense as a percentage of global output averaged 5.1 percent between 1972 and 1990. In the decade after the September 11th attacks, defense expenditures as a percentage of global output averaged only 2.5 percent.13 Latin American defense spending as a percentage of output was even smaller during this period. The peace dividend from hegemony was significant. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the perception of waning U.S. hegemony has been widespread. It is therefore worth noting that this perceived decline has been matched by a dramatic increase in Latin American defense spending. By one measure, absolute defense spending in Latin America practically doubled between 2006 and 2011.14 By 2012, defense spending accounted for approximately 4 percent of total GDP—significantly higher than in the rest of the world.15 In 2013, Latin America increased its defense expenditures, even as the rest of world decreased its military spending. To be sure, much of this defense spending is in response to U.S. preferences, such as combatting narco-trafficking. Yet the region’s increased military budgets are somewhat puzzling, given the ostensible absence of tensions among the countries. They suggest that even if war is comparatively rare in Latin America, security dilemmas and militarized tensions are more common.16 Beyond the insecurity posed by a multipolar world, however, is the uncertainty that comes from an institutionally thicker world.17 This sounds paradoxical. Nevertheless, the proliferation of nested and overlapping regimes does not necessarily lead to an increase in rule-based outcomes. Institutional thickening allows different governments to engage in forum-shopping to find the regime most friendly to their preferences. Forum-shopping weakens the power of pre-existing focal points, raises the costs and complexity of monitoring and compliance, and creates conflicting legal obligations at the regional level. This situation endows great powers with fewer constraints and greater capabilities to affect outcomes. In the process, institutional proliferation erodes the causal mechanisms through which regimes ostensibly strengthen international cooperation. Paradoxically, after a certain point, the proliferation of global governance structures shifts the international system towards a more Hobbesian environment.