Although the United States remains the world’s lone superpower, it is no longer a hyperpower that can bully potential contenders. The rest of the world is catching up. A change from unipolarity to multipolarity is one could facilitate a return nations struggling for power and prestige through war. While some might say a return to this system could destroy todays relative peace amongst great powers, they are incorrect. A return to multipolarity could show us that several emerging powers will emerge to join the United States as powers within the international system. It does not tell us how multipolarity will effect international governance. The question is whether emerging powers accept or resist the western order that will exist when they …show more content…
History has shown us that dramatic changes to international power rarely unfold smoothly or peacefully. The danger of states undergoing rapid rises and declines in relative power, where one state seeks the status of a hegemon and another seeks to maintain it, is less valid than it once was. While the most destructive and influential conflicts in history have been situations where competing powers seek superiority over a rival power, the nuclear age makes power transition by means of war incredibly unlikely. As the cost of conflict between nuclear armed states would be unreasonably costly, the cycle of hegemonic-war has been broken. That leaves the question as to whether the existing international order will facilitate a smooth transition that incorporates emerging powers or one that excludes them and creates greater potential for conflict. The United States has shaped world politics with ideas such as "capitalism is better than socialism" and "democracy is better than dictatorship." However, recently, emerging non-Western powers have let it be known that they do not share the United States ' views on these issues. Bruce Jentleson and Steven Weber argue, "Outside the United States, people no longer believe that the alternative to Washington led order is chaos…. the rest of the world has no fear about experimenting with alternatives." Emerging powers such as China are willing to challenge the U.S., but largely within existing institutions rather than outside them.
After two World Wars (WW I and II) and the cold War, United States took the superpower of the world. “United States has more power inthe world than any other state, and by a substantial margin”, (Posen, 2003, p.5), yet America had been faced with global conflicts and wars although not in large scale, similar to that of the first two world wars. Although world sees United States as policeman and superpower country around the globe, U.S sometimes face critical oppositions, resistant and proxy wars around the world. This become a problem that prompted United States to introduce strategies of power projecting embedded in some areas such as: military bases, economic control, soft power (political control), technology and waging wars on those
The rising of China will be America’s greatest long-term threat because it breaks the world power balance. The relative power logic shows that the increase in the China’s power will make the America’s power decrease. Chinese defense budget grows from $100 billion in 2011 to $215 billion in 2017 while American defense budget decline from $708 billion to $611 billion in the same period. Although the America’s military investment still remarkably higher than China’s, the gap is closer. Once China achieves the regional hegemon, it will attempt to expand its influence on other regions. Moreover, the benefits form institution liberalism system such as the role in UN will encourage China’s desire to replace American’s position. Therefore, when China reaching higher dominating position, it will do not want a peer. In other words, China will gain more power and reach regional hegemon to overcome America, and America will seek to prevent their great powers or, so the predictable outcome may be war.
The United States focused on itself taking the years after the Civil War to rebuild and to become a stronger society. The slaves being granted there freedom, the rise in technology helping business to make more money, and yet women weren’t able to vote. The Reconstruction faltered and a bigger disappointment in relation to women, since the Fourteenth amendment only commented on males not females. Society as a whole were going through changes, from family dynamics, progressive reform, federal government passing laws that affected all, and international relations fluctuating.
As a result, the U.S is beginning to decline its influence, especially with deprioritizing some of its longest allies. The United States is starting to afoot its decision by retrenching in frontier region, as Grygiel and Mitchell state, “U.S. retrenchment from these regions creates a permissive environment for rising or reassertive powers” this can potentially be a problem for smaller states because, once the U.S. decides to leave the area unattended, provisional powers like China will try to assert its influence and Grygiel and Mitchell talk about low-cost revision, in which rising powers try to have marginal gains by not moving in too aggressively than what their ability allows them for. Furthermore, once the United States leaves, there will not be a global power that restrains these emerging rising powers from attempting to allocated themselves as leading power. The reason why the U.S. influence is declining, is due to technology, budget cuts and geographic location which all have major play with the U.S. deprioritization of alliances. Consequently, the U.S. has reached a certain point in which it cannot have a smooth transition from departing away from its alliance, especially since it has kindred them for so long. Commitment to its alliances does
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of its economic system the United States became more powerful than ever. Now as world hegemon, the United States continued to trump its cultural values in their quest to spread the American ways around the world. It is during this period that we adopted the grand strategy of promoting a more liberal international order. The world experienced a proliferation in international organizations as well as more open and inclusive trade
Hegemonic stability theory can be defined as an international leader established from the last global war (a hegemon) that provides the international public goods of security and rule enforcement, allowing cooperation to take place. The lack of a hegemon, or a severely weakened, leads to a return of anarchic conditions and states suffer from fear in a security dilemma. Power transition can also explain preponderance theory. “A dissatisfied challenger rises in capabilities, the international system moves from stability-promoting structural clarity to crises-prone structural ambiguity” (Packer
The United States, it seems, serves as the unofficial international police. We attempt to impose our views on the world and then correct anyone that strays from our “status quo”. Through our diplomatic actions, America tries to preserve our national beliefs in exchange for the deterioration of another country’s. We were formed by the “global forces” who were attempting to create a global empire, but once we became our own nation, we became one of those forces (197).
In a brief 2012 interview with PBS Newshour, Zbigniew Brzezinski offered his opinion on how the United States will need to act during the ongoing changes in the world’s power structure: the rising influence of China and the East, the decline in power of the United States and the West, and a shift in state interactions to focus on global issues. Brzezinski suggests that, in response to these issues, “America ought to strive to create some sort of balance, global equilibrium, so that we can all collectively address the problems that the world faces ” (PBS Newshour, 2012). There are three main components of his argument: first, that America needs to expand the West to include Russia and Turkey as future allies. Next, America needs to re-evaluate
In multi-polar theory, world order is achieved through the cooperation of multiple power systems. In this system powerful states counter-balance each other. It is mainly achieved through international law, international cooperation and economic coordination. The negative side of multi-polarity is that it leads to vulnerability and interdependence, modernization, national interests, multilateralism and problems with international
The study of International Relations surrounds itself in theories such as Realism and Liberalism, with actors and power structures defining the discipline. Actors are key to the study; however, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there has been a key dominant hegemon which rules over the international community. Hegemony as defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, refers to the supremacy of one group over another, often supported by legitimate norms and ideas, and in modern society describes the dominance of a certain set of actions that allows for supremacy in certain areas and a unipolar world. The United States of America emerged from World War II as the overriding economic, political,
The article “China’s Challenge to US Hegemony,” by Christopher Layne was a wonderful article talking about the China challenges the U.S hegemony. In the beginning Layne said that against popular belief the period of American hegemony is drawing to an end and the rise of China is the biggest reason for this. Layne describes how throughout history the emergence of new power in the international system have been “geopolitically destabilizing” and China is no different therefore they are major doubts that they will rise peacefully. To illustrate this Layne used the example of the rise of Japan, United States, and Germany all contributed to the “international political frictions that culminated in two world wars.” Layne address the ideas of engagement
In his article, “The Future of the Liberal World Order”, John Inkenberry discusses what he sees as a global shift in power, from the Western and Northern powers such as the United States and Great Britain to the more Eastern and Southern developing states like China, India and Brazil. This potential shift in power has sparked a fear in many people. This fear, as the global power switches from West to East and North to South, stems from the thinking that these new nations that are coming to power will abolish the liberal world order that we all know. I however believe that instead of challenging the United States for power and changing the world order to more reflect their ideologies, these emerging nations will instead seek a greater position of leadership in the already existing world order. Firstly, I will provide an argument of Inkenberry’s main arguments and why realists’ have started to worry. Second, I will show how China is rising to threaten the United States superpower position in today’s world order, and finally I will illustrate ways which show that China is not challenging the Liberal World Order and why.
As he notes that over the last half century, the international order has assimilated many rising powers into the political and economic landscape (Ikenberry, 58). Ikenberry claims this international order, or liberal order, is built upon the system of Westphalian relations (Ikenberry, 60). Furthermore, the liberal order became established when Britain advocated free trade (Ikenberry, 60). After the great wars, in the twentieth century, the United States took reign of the Liberal order and pushed liberal ideologies upon the world (Ikenberry, 60). Such leadership is seen through the creation of the UN, which created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Ikenberry, 61). Notions of rights, sovereignty and global order followed, leaving us with the concept, as Ikenberry put it: “the responsibility to protect” (Ikenberry, 61). The United States led Liberal order expanded further with the development of multilateral institutions, alliances, free trade deals, and client states (Ikenberry, 61). Consequently, the United States created an order of ideals about markets, openness, and social stability (Ikenberry, 65). However, from these ideals states such as China have risen in power greatly, which creates worry in neighboring states (Ikenberry, 65). Nevertheless, China cannot act aggressively unless it is willing to face severe backlash (Ikenberry, 65). As a result,
The promotion of the Westphalian system at the core of the United States foreign policy is not possible with the challenge of global governance (Sarkar, p. 2). If the United States continues to promote unipolarity through the promotion of the Westphalian order, opposing major powers will being to work together to weaken the hegemon because they have a mutual interest to de-thrown the United States. Instead of promoting the Westphalian order (i.e. unipolarity) at the core of foreign policy the United States should promote a multipolar order by way of détente.
International change takes place when great powers rise and fall and followed by the shift in the balance of power (Jackson and Sorensen, 2003).