US heg is unethical and destabilizing – neglects international law and imposes human insecurity and suffering on underprivileged populations while perpetuating global inequality.

The American proclivity to war (Afghanistan, Iraq) has destabilizing multiplier effects. First, within the United States; an article about "The Iraqi time bomb" notes: "Mix the open-ended costs of war and reconstruction with huge tax cuts, shrinking tax revenues and a stalled economy, and you get a budget deficit bound to explode" (Madrick, 2003). Second, regional and international effects; the IMF's 2003 Global Financial Stability Report warns that "a prolonged war in Iraq could depress financial markets and put global economic recovery into jeopardy" (quoted in Stewart, 2003).

The hegemon makes sacrifices to preserve the system. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense means, substantively, that potentially all stand to benefit and procedurally that the rules of the game are perceived to be fair. But in the present American dispensation "sacrifice is for suckers" (Borosage, 2003) and this applies also internationally. The pattern that increasingly prevails in the United States is political and electoral opportunism; applied to international affairs this approach flaunts the very rules and institutions that the United States has helped to build over many years. American failure to comply with international law, a zigzagging and instrumental attitude to international institutions such as the United Nations, and withdrawal from or nonparticipation in international treaties and covenants, create the impression of an opportunistic hegemony.

In its original formulation, hegemonic stability theory focuses on the global economy, which it views and represents from the standpoint of the North, and underplays the political and military components of hegemony (cf. Posen, 2003), which it views and represents in terms of their benign impact. If we consider that the original formulation of hegemonic stability theory refers to the Vietnam War period and its aftermath (1967-77) this is a remarkable bias. Consider hegemonic stability from a regional viewpoint and the picture does not get better: hegemony in the Middle East has come at the expense of Palestinians and is unstable. We can view hegemonic stability theory as a matrix in which the overall premises of hegemony remain constant, the strategic emphases shift over time, and foreground and background change places. In hegemony thinking, economic and security considerations ("keeping the peace") have mixed all along. During the Clinton administration, the geopolitics of the "indispensable nation" functioned alongside the project of neoliberal globalization; during the Bush II administration, the emphasis has shifted to military and geopolitical concerns (Mann, 2004). Thus hegemonic stability thinking keeps being reproduced in different guises: on political and security grounds, when conservatives and liberals alike applaud the expansion of American power "in a chaotic world," and alternatively on economic grounds. Hegemonic stability thinking of a kind inspires the contemporary tendency to whitewash empire past and applaud empire present (as in Ferguson, 2003, 2004). Hegemonic stability thinking reproduces the same bias over and over: fascinated by displays of power it is oblivious to the cost in human insecurity and suffering that the institutionalization of vast global inequality entails. In viewing the world from the top down, from established comfort zones looking outward, hegemonic stability thinking does not see and does not count the sacrifices made by the underprivileged to maintain stability, the "collateral damage" of stability.

Thus, taking each component of hegemonic stability theory, it is clear that the United States has ceased to perform this role. This erosion of hegemony is widely perceived and there are many different diagnoses and explanations for this fundamental change. Because of the fascination with power, hegemony is widely discussed; surveying the literature we can identify several clusters.