The functionally “inevitable” pursuit of hegomony in the world of the plan proves that policymakers will act in a paranoid manner as they securitize failing hegemony and that locks-in policy failure, turning all their offense.

I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign everywhere, be it the political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest. In truth, they rest on violence and terror, or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on earth, the United States, whose hegemony has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called ‘the West,’ of which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard. Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now become very weak because of the contempt that the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful allies) regularly show toward legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption, do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of ‘the West,’ the specter of punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the dominant nations: who will stop the United States from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa? Yet, though still dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical, weakness. All attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of it) only heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance. Although they rely on a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom), they know that they have lost their hegemony.

‘Domination without hegemony’ is a phrase that Giovanni Arrighi uses in his study of the long twentieth century and his lineages of the twenty-first century (1994/2010 and 2007). Originating with Ranajit Guha (1992), the phrase captures the singularity of the global crisis, the terminal stage of sovereignty, in Arrighi’s “historical investigation of the present and of the future” (1994/2010: 221). It acquires particular meaning in the light of Arrighi’s notion of the bifurcation of financial and military power. Without getting into the question, treated by Arrighi, of the rise of China and East Asia, what I want to note is that for Arrighi, early in the twenty-first century, and certainly with the ill-advised and catastrophic war against Iraq, “the US belle époque came to an end and US world hegemony entered what in all likelihood is its terminal crisis.” He continues:

Although the United States remains by far the world’s most powerful state, its relationship to the rest of the world is now best described as one of ‘domination without hegemony’ (1994/2010: 384).

What can the US do next? Not much, short of brutal dominance. In the last few years, we have seen president Obama praising himself for the killing of Osama bin Laden. While that action was most likely unlawful, too (Noam Chomsky has often noted that bin Laden was a suspect, not someone charged with or found guilty of a crime), it is certain that you can kill all the bin Ladens of the world without gaining back a bit of hegemony. In fact, this killing, just like G. W. Bush’s war against Iraq, makes one think of a Mafia-style regolamento di conti more than any other thing. Barack Obama is less forthcoming about the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose fate many have correctly compared to that of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin (killed in Florida by a self-appointed security watchman), but it is precisely in cases like this one that the weakness at the heart of empire, the ill-concealed and uncontrolled fury for the loss of hegemony, becomes visible. The frenzy denies the possibility of power as care, which is what should replace hegemony, let alone domination. Nor am I sure I share Arrighi’s optimistic view about the possible rise of a new hegemonic center of power in East Asia and China: probably that would only be a shift in the axis of uncaring power, unable to affect, let alone exit, the paradigm of sovereignty and violence. What is needed is rather a radical alternative in which power as domination, with or without hegemony, is replaced by power as care – in other words, a poetic rather than military and financial shift.