A Note on the Closing of the Path to Future U.S. Hegemony—Economic, Political, Geostrategic, Cultural
From hegemon to has-been, remarkably quickly too. But think, post American hegemony, not Chinese hegemony but rather (hopefully peaceful) balance-of-power, and of influence, global politics...
From hegemon to has-been, remarkably quickly too. But think, post American hegemony, not Chinese hegemony but rather (hopefully peaceful) balance-of-power, and of influence, global politics. Trump’s chaos-monkey nature, internal dysfunction, and strategic myopia have indeed opened the door. When the world’s policeman hangs up his badge and becomes a mafia extortion-racket chieftain, the world notices. China may well have an opportunity for hegemony, but it is unlikely to walk through the door…
The answer is: Yes, the path to future U.S. hegemony is now closed.
America’s grip on global leadership didn’t slip—it has been rapidly pried loose by incompetence, distraction, and a studied indifference to history. It is now being deliberately chosen, piece by piece, by those who mistake chaos for strategy and retreat for renewal. The end of U.S. hegemony wasn’t inevitable, and could be being accomplished so quickly only by a strange régime of chaos monkeys, kleptocrats, and grifters. China could seize the initiative to become the new hegemon of a new and different ordo saeclorum. But I think it is no more likely to grasp this nettle than the U.S. was back in 1920.
The long arc of U.S. global dominance, from 1945 to 2020, has ended not with a bang but with a series of self-inflicted wounds. Domestic dysfunction, foreign policy vacillation, and the willful neglect of alliances are now swiftly undermining American influence, credibility, and leadership. What will be left is a vacuum, most likely to be only partially filled, and filled by a balancing of power chaos rather than any new order structured by hegemony. Not Beijing’s ambitions but Washington’s abdication are likely to be at the fore here.
Noah Smith has a nice piece about how Donald Trump and his grifter-enablers are doing a huge number of things to accelerate China’s relative technological, economic, and geopolitical rise, and how now “the path to hegemony looks a lot smoother for China than it did nine months ago”. He gives good, cogent reasons:
Noah Smith: Trump is enabling Chinese power <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-is-enabling-chinese-power>: ‘An incompetent, selfish, inwardly focused administration is making America less of an obstacle to China's rise…. Beginning in Donald Trump’s first term… it seemed as if the world was moving into Cold War 2…. Trump had a reputation as a China hawk… [but] now seemed to have abandoned the idea… against… TikTok divestment… cancel[ing] the bipartisan CHIPS Act that represented America’s best hope of retaining meaningful semiconductor manufacturing capacity. Why would Trump switch from a China hawk to an appeaser?…
As in so many cases, Trump’s actual policies… have been inconsistent, confusing, and sometimes hastily reversed…. Why did Trump cave on H20 chips and design software? The most obvious reason is that Trump has simply chickened out yet again. China has been hurting the U.S. with its own export controls on rare earths…. [hat] bodes ominously for the strategy of economic containment that Biden’s people developed….
China… has a natural advantage in scale… key to reducing manufacturing costs…. The only way for the U.S. to rival China’s scale would be to essentially combine its markets with those of other countries… U.S. allies…. It is exactly those allies that Trump is attacking with his latest round of tariffs. Having backed off of his China tariffs after finding that country to be too hard a target, Trump is looking for wimpier countries to bully….
Now, because of culture-war concerns, Trump is attacking government research…. An attempt to push Chinese talent out of America… ends up strengthening China and weakening the U.S…. Every day… a new policy that will weaken America’s hand against China. For example… [shipbuilding]…. “the NSC shipbuilding office closing… [and] zero follow-through on Trump’s State of the Union promise to open a dedicated White House shipbuilding office…”. This doesn’t seem like deliberate Trump administration sabotage of America’s naval power; it’s too chaotic and involves too many bad actors and competing interests. Instead… simply… extreme incompetence…. The U.S. is purging its diplomatic corps.…
Trump himself is too irresolute, cowardly, and focused on personal enrichment. Too many of his subordinates harbor an isolationist view of geopolitics. The administration in general is too incompetent, too bereft of human capital, and far too focused on prosecuting domestic culture wars by burning down any institution they see as harboring wokeness…. With Trump making America more and more of a geopolitical nonentity, chaos agent, and wild card, the path to hegemony looks a lot smoother for China than it did nine months ago.…
“Hegemony” comes from the Greek “hegemon”—a term that, in its original context, denoted the leader of a coalition, the primus inter pares whose authority derived not from mere brute force but from the capacity to organize, coordinate, and, crucially, to provide. It is more a manager of alliances—not strong enough to dominate, yet powerful enough to lead, while being restrained enough to maintain the consent (or at least acquiescence) of those it leads rather than having its throwing its weight around trigger the formation of a countervailing balance-of-power coalition. “Hegemony” is neither a birthright nor a permanent condition; it is a practice, fragile and perishable, dependent on the continual renewal of both material capabilities and the legitimacy of leadership.
My old teacher Charlie Kindleberger used the term “hegemony” to denote the unique and indispensable role played by a dominant power in stabilizing the international economic system in his 1973 The World in Depression, 1929–1939, which remains the gold standard of comparative economic history. Kindleberger powerfully argued that it was the absence of a willing and able hegemon—specifically, the United States’s failure to take on that role—in the interwar years that was was the root cause of the Great Depression’s depth and duration. Britain, the previous hegemon, had become too weak. America, the rising giant, was too parochial and inward-looking. Kindleberger’s insight was that global order is not self-organizing. It requires a state willing to provide public goods—market access, liquidity, coordination, and, when necessary, a lender of last resort. Without a hegemon to shoulder these burdens, the system devolves into beggar-thy-neighbor policies, competitive devaluations, and, ultimately, collapse. His analysis was not merely historical: it was a pointed warning to all who would assume that international capitalism can function without leadership. Kindleberger’s vision of hegemony is not about domination, but about responsibility—the willingness to act, often at some cost to oneself, for the stability of the whole.
Robert Keohane broadened the concept beyond the study of purely international economic order in his 1984 After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. (Ironically, Keohane’s central point was that even though the U.S. could no longer be a successful hegemon its previous building of institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, GATT, and the UN meant that the international order it had constructed would continue—but the U.S.’s ability to be a successful hegemon was then rising, and would not fall back to below its 1970s level until the 2016 election of Donald Trump.) In the hands of Keohane and others like Stephen Krasner, Susan Strange, and John Ikenberry, “hegemony” became a framework for analyzing not only the provision of economic public goods, but also the construction and maintenance of security alliances, the shaping of international norms, and the creation of durable institutions. “Hegemonic stability theory” posited that the presence of a dominant, rule-setting power—be it the British Empire in the 19th century or the United States in the post-1945 era—was essential for the functioning of a liberal international system. When the hegemon was strong and engaged, the world saw relative peace, open markets, and institutional innovation; when the hegemon faltered or withdrew, the system became vulnerable to fragmentation, rivalry, and crisis.
We can think of hegemony as having four dimensions:
Geostrategic hegemony is the condition in which a single state possesses sufficient military power, willingness, and ability to shape the security architecture, strategic alignments, and conflict outcomes across the globe. Having the largest army and the most advanced technology helps. But the key is being the indispensable power whose preferences, red lines, and guarantees structure the choices of others. The United States, for example, achieved geostrategic hegemony in the post-World War II era by stationing troops across Europe and Asia, underwriting alliances like NATO and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and establishing itself as the ultimate arbiter in crises from Berlin to Korea to the Persian Gulf. This status enabled Washington to deter rivals, reassure allies, and, at times, impose order (or disorder) according to its own interests and values.
Political hegemony is the condition in which a single state or actor possesses the capacity to set the rules of the game for the international political system—not merely through coercion or the threat of force, but by shaping the institutional architecture, agenda, and norms that govern how states interact. It is about being the “rule-maker” rather than the “rule-taker,” the actor whose preferences and priorities are encoded in the treaties, organizations, and informal practices that structure world politics. Political hegemony is not simply a matter of having the most votes or the loudest voice; it is about the ability to build coalitions, set agendas, and define what is legitimate or illegitimate conduct on the world stage. This form of hegemony is inherently dynamic and contested: it requires constant investment in diplomacy, alliance management, and the maintenance of legitimacy, and it is always vulnerable to challenge from rising powers, revisionist actors, or shifts in the underlying distribution of capabilities and ideas.
Economic hegemony is when a single nation both has the power and steps up to set the rules and provide the public goods that underpin the global economic system. This is not simply a matter of having the largest GDP or the deepest capital markets—although those certainly help—but of being the anchor of international finance, trade, and payments. The economic hegemon is the country whose currency serves as the world’s reserve asset, whose markets are open to imports, whose banks provide liquidity in times of crisis, and whose policymakers are looked to for coordination and leadership. Britain in the nineteenth century, with the pound sterling as the global means of settlement and London as the world’s banker, played this role. The United States assumed the mantle in the twentieth century, first hesitantly and then decisively after World War II.
Cultural hegemony is the ability of a dominant society or state to shape, define, and naturalize the values, beliefs, tastes, and everyday assumptions of others—so thoroughly that its worldview becomes the default or “common sense” for much of the world. This is not simply about exporting pop music, movies, or fast food, although Hollywood and McDonald’s are certainly part of the story. Rather, it is about setting the terms of aspiration and legitimacy: what counts as modern, desirable, or even normal. In the twentieth century, American cultural hegemony became manifest in everything from the global spread of English, to the adoption of blue jeans, to the near-universal aspiration to “middle-class” lifestyles and consumer culture. More subtly, it was visible in the spread of liberal individualism, the valorization of entrepreneurship, and the framing of democracy and human rights as universal ideals. When it works, it is the quietest and most enduring form of power: it shapes not just what people do, but what they want.
We had U.S. hegemony in all four dimensions from 1945 to 2020—with some signs of it cracking in the 1970s, and then again in the 2000s as George W. Bush degraded the Western Alliance to a “coalition of the willing”, and then again in the late 2010s as other powers and global citizens frantically tried to figure out how to corral the chaos monkey-nature of Donald Trump I. Do we still have it today? I would argue no:
Culturally, from the rest of the world’s perspective the country of mass shootings by AR-15 that can elect Donald Trump twice is not anything that anybody outside the United States will aspire to and see as a legitimate example of what is desirable, modern, and normal. It’s not something any group of other people save for other countries’ own neofascist grifting would-be élites would want.
Economically, the grave damage done by Trump to American public- and nonprofit-sector science will be a huge handicap.
But there is more. Add to that the near-cessation of immigration of the talented and the entrepreneurial. And add to that the near-enserfment of non-citizens: It is not just those without proper papers who now have to be willing to cut their wage demands enough that their employers do not have an incentive to drop a dime to ICE the day before payday. H1B visa=holders must be similarly wary, and similarly eager to go the extra mile to make sure their employers are getting enormous surplus. Plus green-card holder permanent residents: all Kristi Noem has to do is ask, and Marco Rubio will then immediately revoke your green card and deport you for no reason at all save that someone with in some Trumpist affinity does not like your face.
The creation of such a massively exploitable labor underclass of non-citizens (and citizens who don’t look white enough) is not a full-fledged Jim Crow like the system that kept the American South relatively very poor and its Bourbon aristocracy so dominant in the century after the Civil War. But it definitely does trend in that direction.
No: the likelihood that the American economy will be strong enough to support economic hegemony in the future is now low. More important, the United States will not be trusted to follow-through. And a leader needs the confidence of others that there will be follow-through. American economic hegemony is gone.
Politically, do not make me laugh. The rule of chaos-monkey Trump is that there are no rules. The concept of hegemon simply does not apply. We have, rather, balance-of-power international politics, in which the power that thinks it has predominant force is often surprised by the strength of the countervailing coalitions its attempts to throw its weight around assembles.
And geostrategically? Under Trump, there are no red lines: TACO. There are no guarantees: Trump’s word is simply not good. There are barely preferences. The likelihood that Trump’s Pentagon can manage the creation and maintenance of an effective force rather than degenerate into a free-for-all wealth-diversion feast is very low. There is lots of money in the Pentagon to grab. Prime contractors know how to grab it. Plus all of those kitchens in Vienna, Virginia will not remodel themselves. Remember that this is already the Pentagon that could spend $2.3 trillion on the War in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and end up with Afghani anti-Taliban forces much weaker than the Northern Alliance had been in August 2002. Without adult supervision. I would be very wary of expecting anything good from sending the U.S. military as it will have become in 2029 into harm’s way.
Hegemony is not a birthright. It is a practice, renewed daily by choices—some grand, some mundane. The U.S. had immense resources, allies, and reservoirs of goodwill in 2016. But these assets have and are now being squandered at an extraordinarily rapid rate, definitely in part by simple malice, but even more so by neglect, confusion, and the ever-present temptation to turn inward.
Some people say that come 2029 we can simply rewind things back to 2016, and pretend that nothing in between ever happened. Right.
But that U.S. hegemony is gone does not mean that China’s hegemony is next.
Hegemony as we have known it is, after all, a post-1870 thing, with the rise of the British Empire in the world of full economic globalization. From 1815 to 1870 Britain was predominant but not hegemonic. From 1643 to 1815 France was the most powerful militarily and the most emulated cultural power, but not hegemonic as it was again and again constrained by the balance-of-power formation of counter “grand alliances”. And from the suppression of the Comuneros in 1521 and the Germanias in 1522 to 1643, it was imperial Habsburg Spain that was predominant, but again its throwing its weight around created constraining countervailing coalitions. It requires an international environment culturally, economically, politically, and strategically conducive for it to emerge: one like the post-1870 fully globalized world, or the Aegean Sea between -478 and -454, when Perikles moved the Delian League’s treasury from Delos to Athens, and began embezzling its funds.
China does, as Noah Smith notes, have enormous obstacles to making the 2000s a Chinese century, or even to its own successful economic development and long-run political stabilization. It faces internal power struggles, demographic headwinds, and the limitations of authoritarian governance. Plus it is hard to see China putting the global-cultural and geostrategic jenga blocks in place here—although the economic and political blocks could be attainable, should things break right in terms of economic growth and political stability, and should the Chinese élite be interested in the project.
But they will probably not be. The maintenance of hegemony is an exercise in self-discipline. It requires investment—in alliances, in research, in human capital—and a willingness to subordinate short-term interests to long-term stability. The alternative is a world in which the rules are written elsewhere, or rules are written not at all. Both Britain and the United States developed foreign-policy élites in the 1860s and 1940s, respectively, that were powerful and committed to the hegemonic prospect. I do not see analogous patterns developing now within China.
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I've been reading "The Price of Victory", the third and final volume of N. A. M. Rodger's magisterial "Naval History of Britain". (Those who loathe military history needn't fret; the book is mostly about politics, sociology, and economics. Not until Chapter 9 do we encounter anything on the nuts and bolts of the navy and even that is about ships and guns, not battles.)
The whole work is, as they say, fascinating from every point of view. But there is a particular passage I would like to quote here:
"[The] convergence of living standards, as poor people and poor countries caught up with the rich, was driven by free trade, and particularly by the steep decline in long-distance shipping costs, which halved between 1870 and 1913.
"British governments were pleased to see these changes, because they knew it was both just and wise that Britain should share her prosperity ... In an influential memorandum of 1907, Sir Eyre Crowe ... explained:
'It would ... be but natural that the power of a State supreme at sea should inspire universal jealousy and fear, and be ever exposed to the danger of being overthrown by a general combination of the world. Against such a combination no single nation could in the long run stand, least of all a small island Kingdom ... dependent for its food supply on overseas commerce. The danger can in practice only be averted ... on condition that the national policy of the insular and naval State is so directed as to harmonize with the general desires and ideas common to all mankind ... and closely identified with the primary and vital interests of a majority ..."
Your argument deserves a counter. It only looked at the supply side. Demand is important, too.
Hegemons provide services that others desire. Even the more hateful hegemons promise the basic Hobbesian service: protection from the rapacity of all but the hegemon. (They don't always deliver even this basic service, but they do promise it.) And less hateful hegemons provide other services, which you described well.
Since China does not seem to be an option, there is still a demand for a relatively benevolent hegemon. The demand creates what may be a delusion. The rest of the world has been (all too) willing to believe that American craziness will pass: handing out Nobel Peace prizes in token of this. Even now, the EU, the Anglosphere, and the Asian democracies are acting as if their task is to wait out the crazy, rather than introduce their own hegemony. This delusion may be self-fulfilling. They might continue to force hegemony on the US, even if the US is no longer fit for it.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation.