Liberalism and American Hegemony: Over and Out (original) (raw)

USA and the World: Hegemonic Dominance or Liberal Global Order

Journal of Historical Studies, 2023

The United States of America emerged as a superpower after the Second World War with a proclaimed liberal ideology and a will to global dominance. For this purpose, USA employed not only military might to control and assert influence on its allies but also soft power and subtle means of culture at its disposal. Hence the US by means of military, culture and economy emerged as a hegemonic power at the end of the cold war. The paper aims to take an overview of the US military presence across the continents. The United States is leader of military coalition of powerful states. The USA have approximately 750 military bases with instalments in 80 nations and its major ally the United Kingdom has 145. Its present-day contenders Russia and China are way behind the USA and other states of NATO as Russia has 36 and China has so far one military base in Djibouti at Horn of Africa. These military bases serve the economic purpose as well and provides safe, protected passage to trade ships carrying goods across the globe; as free trade is an important component of a world order conceived with liberal ideology. Though critics of the global liberal order perceive it as the economic dominance of developed states and trade as a means of exploitation, with a mask of liberty, freedom, individualism and free marketing. Besides US military and economic power in the guise of Liberalism, another contributing factor of US hegemony is culture. US through cultural lebensraum and soft power of its consumer products and Hollywood movies create consent across the globe and presents it as a just power not only trading but also protecting humanity from a multitude of threats. By taking an overview of US military, economic and cultural lebensraum, the paper aims to answer how US military preponderance across continents and states along with economic and cultural powers gives it a hegemonic status in the world. Employing content analysis on secondary data one of the major findings of the paper is that despite claims of waning US and rising China, the claim is a far cry not rooted in reality and United States actions are derived by hegemonic interest and are cloaked in the guise of liberalism.

Liberalism in Crisis: A Collapsing World Order

Millennium 42(1), 239-246, 2013

Anna Simons, Joe McGraw, Duane Lauchengco , The Sovereignty Solution: A Commonsense Approach to Global Security (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011, 226 pp., 32.95hbk).GeorgSorensen,ALiberalOrderinCrisis:ChoosingbetweenImpositionandRestraint(Ithaca,NY:CornellUniversityPress,2011,218pp.,32.95 hbk). Georg Sorensen , A Liberal Order in Crisis: Choosing between Imposition and Restraint (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011, 218 pp., 32.95hbk).GeorgSorensen,ALiberalOrderinCrisis:ChoosingbetweenImpositionandRestraint(Ithaca,NY:CornellUniversityPress,2011,218pp.,39.95 hbk). James Mayall, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (eds), The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011, 375 pp., £20.00 pbk). Nick Bisley , Great Powers in the Changing International Order (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012, 209 pp., $49.95 pbk). The four books reviewed here all share the perspective that the liberal world order, created and maintained by American power after the Second World War, is presently under considerable strain. The institutions which support it, whether in Europe or the United States, are currently in disarray. The liberal world order is defined through its promotion of the tenets of liberal internationalism, commonly understood as the desire for global free trade, the adoption of liberal economic policies and promoting the spread of liberal democracy. Liberalism, as a mechanism of organising global politics, has, these authors argue, weakened considerably, resulting in creeping instability and geopolitical uncertainty. The ramifications of this crisis for liberalism differ depending on the author. However, comprehending why the post-war Western liberal order is eroding and offering solutions to arrest its decline are common themes shared amongst the otherwise diverse arguments and analyses presented by each author.

Liberalism and the Contemporary world Order

2020

Liberalism with its protection of individual liberties has been the main ideology dominant across the world since the fall of the berlin wall in 1989. This has seen the dominance and hegemony of the United States of America across the world. But as history has been sure to prove, ideologies like other virtues are cyclical, and thus after the peak of one order, the order dies and then a new order will arise. However, the case in this paper, is that there is a fight back of ideologies in this case communism against Liberalism. This is seen in the rise of powers such as China and North Korea as examples. Thus the paper discusses first on what liberalism is, states about the rise of liberalism, and then interrogates the question whether there has been a decline in the Liberal order across the world. The paper concludes that indeed there has been a fight back by communism, autocracy and rife nationalism, but that these remain to be seen in the future trend worldwide.

Introduction: liberal world order

2013

In this collection of essays, the contributors help us to make sense of these apparent contradictions through challenging the way in which the debate about liberalism has been conducted within the IR academy as well as in policy circles. Against the theoreticians, we argue that liberalism has suffered from being too closely tied to the quest for scientific authenticity, resulting in a theoretical perspective with little or no commitment to political values and political vision. By turning the classical liberalism of Kant, Paine, and Mill, into the neoliberalism of Moravcsik, Keohane, and Simmons, liberalism has been shorn of its critical and normative potential. Going beyond the current political debate, we argue that liberalism cannot be understood if its focus is solely directed at the United States and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To be sure, liberal order version 2.0 may be seen as synonymous with American power and American policy, and liberal internationalism is t...

The Political Economy of Hegemony: The (Surprising) Persistence of American Hegemony

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2017

First-generation research in International Political Economy focused considerable attention on the relationship between hegemony and global economic stability. This focus was the result of a confluence of scholarly and policy concerns about the impact that the apparent decline of U.S. hegemony would have on international trade and investment regimes. Interest in this hegemonic stability hypothesis waned, however, as deeper explorations of the theoretical logic indicated that hegemony was not a necessary condition for international economic openness, and as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent “unipolar moment” suggested that American hegemony was hardly in decline.Interest in hegemony resurfaced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis triggered many scholars to proclaim the end of the era of American global hegemony. Scholars argued that the U.S. government’s attachment to a large budget and trade deficits and the resulting growth of foreign debt were lik...

The liberal order in Peril: the future of the world order with the west against the rising rest

2015

As part of its Observatory Program, Istanbul Policy Center (IPC), in cooperation with the Transatlantic Academy and Columbia Global Centers, organized a second conference on the "Future of the Liberal Order." 1 The one-day roundtable conference took place on May 27, 2014, at Columbia University's Reid Hall facilities in Paris. The purpose of this roundtable, like that of the preceding one, was to develop new ideas and fresh insight from a small group of international participants with a view to contributing to the ongoing debates on the shaping of a post-Western world. Both of these conferences drew upon the work done by the Transatlantic Academy over the past two years, but they were not confined solely to the issues taken up by the Transatlantic Academy fellows. The first conference held in Istanbul on May 22-23, 2013, took as its point of departure the Transatlantic Academy's 2013 report, Transatlantic Disconnect: Citizenship and Accountability in the Transatlantic Community. 2 The questions that arose in that meeting have been incorporated in the conference report Considering the Future of the Liberal Order: Hope, Despair and Anticipation. 3