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Whatever Happened
to American Decline?
International Relations
and the New United States
Hegemony
Michael Cox
Version of record first published: 18 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Michael Cox (2001): Whatever Happened to American Decline?
International Relations and the New United States Hegemony, New Political
Economy, 6:3, 311-340

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 New Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2001

Whatever Happened to American

Decline? International Relations and
the New United States Hegemony
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MICHAEL COX

If international relations is to be judged by its ability not merely to understand

the world as it is but to anticipate what it might become, then by any measure
it has to be judged to be—or to have been—one of the more dismal of the social
sciences. 1 The list of either what it got wrong, or did not get right, is perhaps
too long to bear repetition here, possibly best forgotten. Others, however, may
not let us forget. One such was the senior editor of a major foreign policy
magazine. Who, he asked, called the following? The end of the Cold War in
Eastern Europe? The collapse of the Soviet Union? The East Asian crisis?
Japan’s swift transformation in the 1990s from economic model and powerhouse
to Ž nancial basket-case? The answer, he concluded, was virtually no-one.2 Nor,
he might have added, did many people seem to anticipate the complexity of the
new international order either. In fact, most experts after 1989 tended to take
refuge in old intellectua l certainties—with either dire predictions coming from
one section of the international relations community about the future looking
very much like the past, or Kantian optimism emanating from another about an
emergent international system where the pacifying force of democracy, the
integrating power of the market and the stabilisin g role of multilateral institu-
tions would combine to create a world of relative peace and prosperity.3 Such
categories could neither account for the multi-faceted character of the new world
of the 1990s, nor did they furnish any meaningful way of deŽ ning the new era.
Indeed, the most popular way of doing so, it seemed, was not so much in terms
of what it was—though globalisation did try to Ž ll the gap—but rather in terms
of what it was not or what it had come after. Thus according to tastes, we were
either now entering, or had in fact entered into, a post-Cold-War era, a
post-socialis t order, a post-Westphalia n age or, according to some, a postmodern
world where the only thing one could say about it with any certainty was that
there was no certainty at all. For the Ž rst time in history, it very much looked
as if we understood the world system not as an entity in its own right, but rather
in relation to what it happened to have replaced. Intellectually at least, it was all
rather backward looking.

Michael Cox, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion,

SY23 3DA, Wales, UK.

ISSN 1356-346 7 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online/01/030311-3 0 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd 311
DOI: 10.1080/1356346012009133 3
 Michael Cox

If the end of the Cold War produced no real consensus about how we should
comprehend the new international order, one of the reasons for this was the
traumatic impact which the great upheavals of the late 1980s had upon inter-
national relations as an academic discourse.4 For the larger part of the postwar
period the discipline had been shaped, more or less, by a tough-minded realism
that was preoccupied with power and largely concerned to explain what states
did (or did not do) to each other under conditions of anarchy. With the passing
of the old order, these preoccupations were judged by many to have been
misconceived or even illegitimate.5 There were more important questions to
ask—or so it was reasoned—and more interesting avenues to go down. Gradu-
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ally, what had once been a well-deŽ ned subject with clear boundaries and an
even clearer set of legitimate questions, began to fragment into many parts. The
result was shattering in more ways than one. At one level, the infusion of new
issues injected a much-needed burst of dynamism into what had once been a
rather moribund subject. The other important outcome, however, was to dethrone
the rule of the realists who now came under sustained attack from those who
accused them, in turn, of having been responsible for the Cold War,6 for then
failing to anticipate its end,7 ignoring the normative,8 underestimatin g the
economic, apologisin g for the actions of the powerful, establishin g a false
dichotomy between the domestic and the international and, above all, privileging
the role of the state. Nor was this all. According to critics, realism simply could
not explain what was actually happening in a world where global economic
change was fast undermining the notion of sovereignty and non-state forces and
actors were rapidly redeŽ ning traditional concepts of security. Realism was not
just old-fashioned : it was simply not up to the job of understandin g the new
world order.9
If the turn against state-centric realism unlocked a good deal of previously
untapped intellectual energy, not all of the results were unambiguously positive.
Indeed, while internationa l relations as a whole might have become more vibrant
and open as a result of the end of the Cold War, the sustained attack upon old
‘truths’ meant that it increasingly tended to lose interest in that one concept
central to the whole realist canon,10 namely, power and its distributio n in a world
of competing states.11 There may have been sound intellectual reasons for doing
so, but the logical consequence was to make the new internationa l relations
generally shy of deploying the term at all. This was especially problematic when
it came to the systematic study of states in general.12 It was doubly unfortunate
when it came to the study of one very special type of state in particular: the
USA.13 The object of intense discussion during the heady days of the Cold War,
academic interest in it continued, but a good deal of this work (with a few
notable exceptions)14 was either left to the diplomatic historian,15 the radical
critic 16 or those whose primary aim was not so much to develop new theory as
to advise those in power on how best to advance America’s purpose in the
world. 17 In internationa l relations, meanwhile, it almost looked as if the United
States had gone out of fashion: and for all its apparent diversity the discipline
as it evolved seemed to be more concerned with getting its epistemology right
than getting US hegemony right, more interested in studying the status of norms
and the role of culture than in measuring something crudely material like US
312
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

power. To the proverbial Martian, it would have all looked very odd. Nor was
this all. Precisely because academic international relations appeared to lose
interest in analysing the position of the US state within the wider world
system—though empirical studies galore continued to be written on what the
USA had been doing,18 ought to be doing19 and would be doing in the
twenty-Ž rst century20—its practitioners were caught completely off-guard by one
of the most important developments of the last decade of the millennium : the
renaissance of US power after what many saw as a long period of almost
relentless decline. This most remarkable turnaround (if turnaround it was) not
only passed international relations by, it was more or less ignored by it
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altogether. Only after the event did it occur to the cognoscenti that something
rather remarkable had taken place. In this, of course, internationa l relations was
not alone. With a few notable exceptions, most other people got it wrong as well.
As has been observed, it is quite odd how few students of world politics actually
got the new US hegemony right.21 Once again, the experts were looking the
other way when it came to understandin g the world around them.
This article takes as its point of departure the simple, incontrovertibl e fact that
most writers managed to get the 1990s just as wrong as they had got the 1980s.
To understand the present, however, we have to look at history. The Ž rst part of
the article therefore will provide a brief analysis of the notion of the American
century and en passant advance a security-based theory of hegemony.22 The
second will then explore why so many commentators, both academic and
popular, took it as read that the US ‘empire’—albeit after a brilliant initial
phase—was beginning to reveal signs of serious wear and tear from the late
1960s onwards. As I will show, the notion that the United States was in serious
trouble, and could easily go the way of all other great powers in the past, had
achieved something close to an intellectual and political consensus by the late
1970s. 23 This might then help explain the popularity of one especially in uential
intervention into the debate on US decline: that made by Paul Kennedy with his
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers published in the late 1980s. I discuss his
book, and the huge impact it had, before moving on to examine the arguments
of the so-called ‘revivalists’. They, in turn, provide a useful entrée into looking
at the new US self-conŽ dence of the 1990s. Finally, I speculate about the future
and ask perhaps the most pertinent question of all: can US hegemony persist?
Or, put another way, will the twenty-Ž rst century be even more ‘American’ than
the twentieth?24

From the American century to American hegemony

When Henry Luce coined the term the ‘American Century’ in 1941, he was both
passing judgment on the past and anticipating what he believed, and hoped,
would be the future.25 Luce, however, was no great historian and he said little
about the deeper causes of the USA’s rise to power from the late 19th century
onwards. Thus there was no serious assessment in his famous article of either the
critical part played by a bloody Civil War in holding the nation together, of the
peculiarly brutal form which capital accumulation then took in the USA, or the
role which mass immigration played in making possible the rapid development
313
 Michael Cox

of capitalism before the First World War. Nor did he say much either about the
role of the First World War itself and the massive shift this affected in the
balance of political and economic power between the United States and Europe
on the one hand, and New York and London in the international Ž nancial system
on the other. Luce’s aim, basically, was to celebrate the genius of the USA, not
understand the country from a critical perspective. For this reason, no doubt, his
editorial struck a responsive chord amongst the readers of Time magazine. Bred
to believe in US manifest destiny by missionary parents in China, Luce had a
simple aim: of articulating what amounted to a grand imperial vision in which
the United States from its position of superiority would not just lead the world,
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but change it at the same time. To do this, however, it would Ž rst have to break
from the self-contained habits he felt were deeply embedded in the American
experience. This was critical for the world and it was essential for the United
States. Isolationis m had been tried, it had palpably failed, and now there was
only one way forward—and that way was outwards.
Luce was by no means the Ž rst, nor would he be the last, to see a close
connection between what happened in the international system at large and the
interests of the United States. What he failed to see, however, was the equally
important relationship that existed between the rise of US power and global war.
This was naïve to the point of blindness. The USA undoubtedl y had major
technological and scientiŽ c advantages over its competitors, as Luce correctly
observed. Nonetheless, it was to be the experience of war in general, and another
great war in particular, that was Ž nally to transform the United States from a
great economic power with limited international and military reach (in 1939
there were fewer than 200,000 men in the US army, only 125,000 in the navy,
and fewer than 25,000 in the marine corps)26 to a true superpower. Indeed, if we
are to talk of an American century, it did not open in 1941 when Luce wrote his
famous call to arms, but four years later when the war Ž nally came to an end.
By 1945 the United States found itself in a quite remarkable position of
strength, one without parallel in the twentieth century, and possibly in the history
of all great powers. The facts, for once, speak for themselves. After the most
devastating of human con icts, the USA found itself in the enviable position of
controlling well over half of the world’s economic product, 70 per cent of the
world’s merchant marine, three quarters of all agricultural surpluses, the same
proportion of all the world’s planes, 90 per cent of the world’s natural gas and
the bulk of its Ž nancial reserves. It was, moreover, in such a position of
undisputed military superiority (which included until 1949 the sole possession of
the atomic bomb) that intelligence at the time could detect no serious enemy
worth speaking of. Even the USSR did not constitute a major strategic threat,
and was not likely to become one for at least 10 years, according to US
assessment. 27 Nor was this all. Whereas the war had left all of the great powers
in a state of material destitution —and none more destitute than the Soviet
Union—it had, by contrast, generated the most extraordinary surge of economic
activity in the United States. Again the Ž gures tell their own remarkable story.
In 1939 the USA was still in the throes of a depression with over 13 per cent
of its workforce unemployed. By 1945 the US economy had roughly doubled in
size, there were jobs for all, living standards were at an all-time high, US
314
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

industrie s were working at full capacity, and most of these were world leaders
and would remain so for the next two decades at least. The only cloud on the
US horizon was not the threat of economic breakdown, as was the case in nearly
every other country, but how to keep the momentum going once the war had
come to an end.28
The experience of global con ict waged victoriousl y across two oceans and
many continents thus left the United States in a most remarkable position, one
that it could never hope to sustain once its various rivals and competitors had
recovered from the trauma of war. To that extent the USA was almost fated to
decline. Nevertheless, for the next twenty-Ž ve years, it was able to underwrite
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what amounted to a new reformed global order that was altogether more stable
than that which had existed between 1919 and 1945.29 Naturally enough, this
order was not geographically complete, the very existence of the Soviet bloc and
Communist China put paid to that.30 Nor was the United States able to manage
the international system without a good deal of support from key allies,
especially the UK.31 Moreover, it could not always get its own way, even with
those dependent on its largesse.32 Indeed, as others have pointed out, often it was
reluctant to get involved, sometimes it had to be invited in, and frequently it had
to compromise with its free market inclination s in Western Europe in order to
prop up the democratic left against the communists.33 All this much is obvious
from the historical record. Yet those who dispute the idea that the United States
was not essential to restoring some form of new equilibrium after 1945 either
miss the main point, or have such a restricted notion of what a hegemon is, that
no power in history—including the USA after the war—could ever be deŽ ned
as one.34 Clearly, the USA was not able to do everything. There were limits to
its power,35 but it is inconceivable to imagine the restoration and maintenance of
international stability in the postwar period without it.
Merely to list the various contribution s to world order made by the United
States after 1945 makes the case for hegemony far more convincingl y than any
theoretical defence of the concept itself. The USA was centrally important, Ž rst,
in the containment of some of the more important threats to global capitalism
after 1947, without which there could have been no large-scale economic
recovery in the postwar period.36 It then went on to pump vast amounts of dollars
into Europe—initially in the form of direct aid before 1948, then through the
more organised vehicle of the Marshall Plan and Ž nally in the shape of military
assistance. 37 The USA, moreover, became the central prop of stability in Asia.
Indeed, without its various intervention s there, there is little chance that either
the region in general or Japan in particular could have prospered.38 The United
States also performed at least three essential functions for a recovering world
economy by underwriting a new internationa l Ž nancial system with its own
reserves, establishin g a series of institution s like the IMF to help manage that
system and providing a vital market for other people’s goods. It even furnished
a wider political and moral mission for the world outside of the Soviet bloc in
the shape of anti-communism , a doctrine which not only legitimised its own
global role but also united previously divided states. Admittedly, its hegemony
often assumed an authoritaria n political form, notably in the Third World. Nor
was social justice the necessary outcome of the new liberal empire it sought to
315
 Michael Cox

build upon the debris left behind by the collapse of the interwar system. But
ultimately the United States succeeded far more often than it failed and so long
as it could bear or transfer the economic costs, sustain public support and win
more struggles abroad than it lost—which until Cuba and the disaster of Vietnam
it managed to do with a fair degree of regularity—there was no reason to think
it could not continue to play an indispensabl e role at the heart of the international
system.

Farewell to the American dream?

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At what point, and for what particular set of reasons, the American dream began
to go sour remains a subject of some dispute amongst historians. What is not in
dispute is that a line of sorts was crossed at some point in the 1960s, and that
once crossed this left the USA a very different country to the one it had been
before. The transition did not occur in the Ž rst instance, however, for classically
realist reasons.39 Indeed, in simple military terms at least, the USA was far more
powerful by the end of the 1960s than it had been at the beginning of the decade.
Nor was the US under any real threat from an upwardly mobile rival. Admit-
tedly, the USSR was now more prosperous and its military capacity greater than
it had been at the start of the Cold War. Nonetheless, it was still relatively
backwards in economic terms, it had nowhere near the global reach of the United
States, its in uence in Western Europe remained limited, it faced an ongoing
crisis of legitimacy in its own ‘backyard’, it actually appeared to be less
ideologically threatening than it had been just after the war, and it had lost its
most important ally in the shape of communist China. So benign did the situation
seem that some analysts—many with close connections to the US establish-
ment—concluded that the Cold War was beginning to lose its meaning and that
better days lay ahead. Vietnam aside, the future looked anything but dangerous.40
How, then, should we account for the new pessimism? The answer in the Ž rst
instance is not to be found in a study of the ‘outside’, but rather in an
examination of the United States itself and the multiple stresses to which it was
being subjected from the 1960s onwards. As we have been constantly reminded
by an ever-growing list of writers who happened to be there at the time, the
1960s was an era of enormous disturbance which opened with the civil rights
movement, continued with several long hot summers in the ghettoes of the
North, and concluded with a mass protest movement against the war in Vietnam.
America, to paraphrase the title of a famous book on the period, was beginning
to come apart at the seams.41 The ideological consequences of what some writers
have called ‘the second American civil war’ were extraordinarily divisive.42 On
the one hand, it produced an increasingly critical intelligentsi a no longer
prepared to endorse ofŽ cially sponsored narratives about the USA’s unblemished
past. On the other, it caused a major lurch to the right amongst large sections of
the middle class who saw traditiona l values coming under attack from their
increasingly vocal enemies on the liberal and radical left. The consequences of
this were immense. Most immediately, it undermined what had once been an
agreed consensus about the nature of the American story. More seriously, it led
to a critical interrogation about the character of US power, with liberal critics
316
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

asserting against their opponents on the right that limits ought to be placed on
it, and ideologue s on the right insisting that the 1960s had eroded US power and
that something needed to be done to reverse the trend. In this highly divisive
way, therefore, the issue of decline was introduced on to the intellectual and
political agenda.43
To this heady ideological cocktail was then added a more material factor:
economic insecurity. While the economy overall continued to expand, though
not at the same pace it had done in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of signiŽ cant
changes meant that times in general began to get harder, rather than easier, for
many people.44 This might not have caused a serious deterioration in the position
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of all Americans; some in fact beneŽ ted from the economic restructuring process
then underway. However, it did have a marked impact on the material position
of millions of them. Some simple comparisons make the point clearer. Between
1955 and 1973, wages for all production workers went up in real terms by about
38%. In the 20-year period following they declined for about three quarters of
the same group by about 13 per cent. Moreover, whereas in the six years before
1973 well over over 70 per cent of heads of household saw their incomes going
up by approximately 4 per cent, after that date over 42 per cent of the same
group experienced a fall in real wages. Indeed, between 1973 and 1989, half of
all fully employed household heads experienced either an actual reduction in
pay, or found themselves unable to attain even a minimally adequate job.45 This
was not all. Associated with this downward trend was an erosion in the size of
the traditional US economic base. For a country that had grown up believing that
a strong USA presupposed a vibrant manufacture, this came as an enormous
shock. These industries, after all, were not just job providers or community
creators, but economic virility symbols that had Ž rst helped the United States
win the Second World War (who had not heard of the USA as the ‘arsenal of
democracy’?) and then made it possible for the USA to out-produce everybody
else in the dangerous days of the Cold War. For those who had grown up in an
age of heavy industry where life was only supposed to get better, it seemed
palpably obvious after 1970 that the United States had seen better days.46
If the end of economic certainty reduced conŽ dence in the idea of the USA
as a material dream, an associated erosion of political authority weakened the
institution s of the state itself. The causes of what one writer has aptly termed a
‘legitimacy crisis’47 have been the subject of much anguished discussion by
different commentators—sufŽ ce to say here that a triple combination of Vietnam
and its televised atrocities, Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon, and
subsequent revelations about the abuse of power directed against ‘enemies’, both
domestic and foreign, did a great deal of harm to the moral standing of the US
political enterprise. Nor did the damage end there. At the very apex of the
system stood the President whose own position of strength had been enhanced
immensely by the very exigencies of the Cold War. Not for nothing was the
holder of the highest ofŽ ce in the land referred to as being ‘imperial’ between
1947 and 1972. Now all this was to change. Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to declare
war over Vietnam, followed by the abuse of presidential power by his Republi-
can successor, caused an inevitable backlash—one that led at one level to a
partial reassertion of Congressional power and at another to a more general
317
 Michael Cox

decline of trust in presidential authority. The President’s powers remained

formidable, but the relationship between the ofŽ ce and the ofŽ ce-holder, and the
other parts of the political system, had altered irrevocably. The consequence was
to make decisions more difŽ cult to take, and the decision-makin g process far
more complex than it had ever been before.48 To many on the inside at least, it
appeared as if the nation no longer had a system capable of devising a serious
or coherent global strategy. Entropy had set in and the only outcome, it was
predicted, would be foreign policy breakdown.49
Finally, any assessment of what was happening within the United States
should not discount the profound cultural upheavals that accompanied these
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more tangible changes in the US political system. For when conservatives in

particular argued that the country was going downhill, they were not only
referring to something speciŽ cally economic or political, but to a more general
erosion of a set of standards associated in their minds with a time when the USA
was still riding high in the world. This world now appeared to be crumbling. On
the streets they saw riots, in the colleges a tolerance for unacceptable ideas, and
all around a denigration of old authority symbols like the  ag and the consti-
tution. To those raised on the basic staples of patriotism and muscular American-
ism, these attacks amounted to something close to a revolution. The country in
their eyes also seemed to be facing moral collapse. The golden age of the 1950s
(so-called) was only ‘golden’ to those who never challenged the dull conformity
it assumed and the cult of the normal it encouraged. Yet this too now came
under siege from a younger generation keen to escape the discipline s of the past.
Even the personal became very political as a sexual revolution swept the nation,
in the process challenging the nuclear family and the broader structures of
patriarchy. The times were certainly changing, to paraphrase the song. They
were changing fast, but in the eyes of middle America they were not necessarily
changing for the better.

Beyond Pax Americana: after hegemony?

If changes on the home front were upsetting to the domestic equilibrium, equally
important disturbances in the international system started to tear away at US
self-conŽ dence. No doubt if the situation within the United States had been more
settled, then perceptions of the outside world might have been less alarming. By
the same token, if the world at large had appeared more orderly, then many
people within the United States might have been less prone to moral and
political panic. Yet they were, and partly for this reason, they came to look upon
the ten year period between 1970 and 1980 as an appalling ‘decade of neglect’.
That, at least, is how Ronald Reagan characterised it. On that premise he was
swept into ofŽ ce in 1980 vowing to reverse US fortunes. Dismissed by liberals
and underestimated by enemies, this consummate ‘peddler of crisis’50 still
managed to weave together a narrative of sorts, which, although  awed in many
obvious ways, did tap into an underlying feeling that the United States was in
decline and that something needed to be done about it.51
The most immediate reason for people thinking in this way was, of course, the
Vietnam War. As one of the great sociologists of our time has pointed out,
318
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

societies and systems can remain stable for long periods, but what renders them
susceptible to upheaval is defeat in war.52 So it was with the United States
following Vietnam. Originally conceived by the USA as a means of holding the
line in a region of great importance—though ironically in a country that was
not—the con ict Ž rst split the foreign policy elite, then went on to make it shy
of further intervention in other places, and over the longer term did enormous
damage to the USA’s credibility as global policeman. The war also weakened an
already frail consensus within the United States about the raison d’être of US
power, and where (and where not) it ought to be used—if indeed it ought to be
used at all. Many even began to wonder what exactly the US mission should be
after Vietnam.53 Should it remain what it had always been, that is principal
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leader of a heavily armed, anti-Soviet coalition composed of dependent allies?

Or should it change fundamentally in the wake of Vietnam and assume a more
modest role? Whatever the answer, there was no getting away from the fact that
the trauma of Vietnam had done serious damage to the United States from which
there would be no easy recovery.54
Vietnam, however, was never the main issue in a country where all strategic
roads led to the Soviet Union and all foreign policy questions could be reduced
to one: how to manage Soviet power? By the late 1960s there were no longer
any easy answers, something which caused particular consternation on the
political right. Unwilling to abandon the truths of the Cold War and deeply
suspicious of any attempt to negotiate with Moscow from anything other than a
clear position of strength (détente they detested), conservatives by the late 1970s
were beginning to feel decidedly panic-stricke n about what they saw as a
growing Soviet threat. This had as much to do with their own Cold War
pathology as it did with anything then being done by the Soviet Union. But two
factors played a part in fuelling their fears: the USSR’s acquisition of a
conventional force structure capable of projecting in uence more successfully
and its achievement of nuclear parity. Although neither threatened to upset the
balance of power in any dramatic way, together both developments set the alarm
bells ringing in conservative circles. This, in turn, was linked to a wider concern
about a new economic and political assertiveness in the Third World and the fear
that the Soviet Union would seek to exploit this following US defeat in Vietnam.
No doubt such worries were greatly exaggerated at the time. Nonetheless, they
were not without some foundation in fact, and as one country after another in the
Third World challenged the old status quo—often with tacit Soviet support—US
policy makers began to express increasing concern that the USSR, and those
allied to it like Cuba, were beginning to extend their in uence abroad without
the United States being able to do very much about it.55
Finally, if threats of a more traditiona l nature disturbed realists on the right,
challenges of an economic character very much concerned those keen to
maintain the liberal international order constructed by the USA in the postwar
period. 56 The reasons for these new disturbances, and their long-term conse-
quences for the wider capitalist system, were the subject of much anguished
debate at the time, frequently between two sides which seemed to talk past each
other rather than to each other. Throughout this dialogue of the deaf, often
marred by what a couple of commentators have termed ‘ideological distortion
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 Michael Cox

and differential interpretation of the same set of statistics’, there were some
things at least about which analysts could agree.57 One was the fairly self-evident
fact that major changes were afoot which were rapidly undermining US produc-
tivity and thus seriously reducing its ability to compete in global markets.58
Another fairly severe threat to the old rules of the game was rising in ation, the
consequence on the one hand of enhanced government spending on social
welfare, and on the other of the refusal by successive presidents to Ž nance an
already unpopular war in Southeast Asia from direct taxation. Equally disturbing
was the decision in 1971 to devalue the dollar. Taken in the Ž rst instance to
address the growing problem of rising Japanese competition, the so-called Nixon
shock certainly helped restore some conŽ dence to the US business community.59
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The longer term result, however, was to undermine the old Bretton Woods
system of Ž xed exchange rates and, by so doing, introduce an element of
Ž nancial instabilit y into the world economy which had not been present before.60
Nor did the problems end there. In 1973 OPEC forced up the price of oil; two
years on, unemployment reached an all-time high; and by the end of the decade
there was universal agreement that times had never been so bad. Meanwhile,
overshadowing everything, there were those ever-present twin clouds, the trade
gap and the Ž scal deŽ cit.61 The budget crisis, in particular, was regarded as being
especially problematic and would, if not tackled (or so it was reasoned), reduce
the effectiveness of the United States as general manager of the wider inter-
national system. How much ink was spilled on this particular subject would be
impossible to calculate. But several weighty volumes and thousands of learned
articles and op. ed. pieces constantly repeated the same simple mantra: that a
nation that was unable to balance its own books, or raise enough taxes at home
to cover its various expenditures abroad, could not be taken seriously as a world
power. To be a successful hegemon one not only had to be rich; one also had
to be solvent. In world politics, as in life, bankrupts were not seen as having a
great deal of credibility.62
Divided at home, confronted by new competitors abroad, faced with new
uncertainties in an increasingly crisis-prone world where both enemies and allies
alike were eroding its previous position of strength, there seemed to be little
room for complacency. At best the United States was becoming what Richard
Rosecrance termed an ‘ordinary country’ with its wings ‘entangled’ like the
metaphorical ‘eagle’; at worst an indebted, has-been superpower, with a declin-
ing capacity to shape the world around it.63 This certainly seemed to be the view
of most academic analysts who contrasted the immediate postwar years with the
situation 25 years on, and came to the not unreasonable conclusion that the
United States was no longer capable of underwriting global stability. A number
of writers even talked of a critical transition from one era of US hegemony to
another of mere preponderance, and assumed that this was bound to have grave
implications for the international economic order.64 Policy makers were equally
gloomy. In fact, long before Reagan assumed ofŽ ce there was hardly anybody
of in uence who contemplated the future with very much optimism; indeed,
most assumed that as US power retreated new deals would have to be struck—
with the USSR, communist China and various Third World regimes, in order to
preserve US in uence under conditions of increasing stress. Henry Kissinger
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

was typically blunt (and bleak) in his assessment. The United States might
remain the predominant power, he argued, but it no longer had the material
capabilities or the political will necessary to run the world in the way it had been
able to do before.65 Jimmy Carter, this ‘accountant of decline’ and ‘manager of
retreat’ as he was once described, was even less upbeat.66 The international
system, he believed, had become a more complex place in which power was no
longer in the hands of the United States alone.67 To maintain order in the global
system, therefore, the US would have to employ other, more subtle means.68 The
world had changed and this confronted the USA with a simple choice: either to
defy reality and pay the price, or make the necessary adjustments and come to
terms with the fact that US dominance was nowhere near as complete, or secure,
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as it had been in that heroic era which opened in 1945 and came to a messy end
over 25 years later.69

From Ronald Reagan to Paul Kennedy

Into this maelstrom entered the Ž gure of Ronald Reagan whose sunny dispo-
sition and optimistic outlook contrasted enormously with that of his immediate
predecessors. Their approach was subtle, manipulative and intellectual; his was
simple, muscular and populist. They saw problems; he saw solutions . Their
pessimism about the future placed them very much outside the country’s
mainstream. Reagan stood very much within it and took it for granted that the
United States was not only exceptional, but was so precisely because there was
no obstacle it could not in the end overcome. Thus to think that decline was the
USA’s fate was almost un-American in his view. The world was there to be
refashioned, and his administratio n would do it through a combination of bold
measures that would roll back the frontiers of government at home and in this
way revive the US economy from below, re-establish the international moral
high-ground and in the process ditch the Vietnam syndrome, and confront the
source of most of the USA’s ills—the Soviet Union—and force it on to the
defensive for the Ž rst time in a decade. A world was there to be won and it was
up to the United States to win it.70
Initially, Reagan’s odd policy mixture of neoliberal economics, muscular
Americanism and Cold War rhetoric seemed to sweep all before it. It was, as
Reagan frequently repeated at the time, ‘morning-time’ in a new America
waking up from a long sleep induced by bad leaders, poor policies and a
defeatist outlook. Unfortunately for Reagan, neither his views on the immediate
past, nor his faith in US power, were enough to convince critics that his
approach to the world was either realistic or affordable. Momentarily thrown on
to the defensive by the surge of support for the new President, they soon began
to regroup around a number of key ideas—the overwhelming majority of which
rehearsed many of the classic ‘declinist’ themes made popular in the 1970s. It
was argued, for example, that his policies did not re ect current international
realities. They also assumed a US position of strength which no longer existed.
They failed to take note of the fact that the United States confronted a more
complex, interdependent world and they ignored the legacy of Vietnam. More-
over, the country simply could not afford them, and the net effect of supporting
an expensive military build-up, while simultaneousl y cutting taxes,
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 Michael Cox

would be to exacerbate the nation’s economic problems, rather than make them
better. What made his strategy all the more dubious, of course, was that it was
premised on the assumption that the USSR could either be pushed around or
could never alter. This, they opined, was not only dangerous, but happened to
ignore one simple fact: that the Soviet Union after 1985 was changing, and
changing very rapidly. Hence, what was the point of continuing with a costly
military build-up that threatened to bankrupt the nation, and a foreign policy of
confrontation that was bound to exacerbate relations with allies and lead the
country into all sorts of costly and dangerous misadventures abroad? The time
was ripe, surely, for a major rethink in strategy, in part to take advantage of the
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new opportunitie s presented by the dynamics of perestroika in the USSR itself,

but more obviously to relieve the United States of the burden imposed on it by
an extended Cold War with a foe that was on the threshold of major reform.71
Into this politically  uid situation entered the rather unlikely academic Ž gure
of Paul Kennedy, an English historian resident in the USA with a major
reputation for writing worthwhile studies on European international history and
the diplomacy of the late 19th century, but very little else.72 Kennedy was
certainly an odd candidate for new American guru. He had expressed no great
interest in the decline debate thus far, although signiŽ cantly he had re ected at
length before on the slow metamorphosis of Britain from imperial to middle
range power.73 He had also written very little of signiŽ cance on the United
States, had little background in international relations theory and could hardly be
deŽ ned as an expert on modern strategic matters. Yet his weighty tome on The
Rise and Fall of Great Powers sold in vast quantities, became the subject of an
intense debate and provoked a heated discussion which went to the very heart
of the US political establishment .74 In effect, his book (only one chapter of
which was devoted to the United States) did more to popularise the idea of
decline than any other single individual volume or article on the subject.
Whether his argument would have found the ready audience it did without many
already believing it to be true anyway is unlikely; and whether it would have
struck the chord it managed to if it had not provided critics with useful
ammunition with which to attack Reagan is doubtful. That said, his study
obviously contained an important message in its own right, one which seemed
to catch the public imagination, and as a result turned Kennedy, the respected
Yale historian, into a media star overnight.75
The Kennedy ‘thesis’, as it soon came to be known, was neither especially
original nor particularly well put. Indeed, versions of the same had been
advanced before, by Kennedy himself in his own writings on the decline of the
British power, as well as by a number of leading American scholars such as
Robert Gilpin, who had earlier and more concisely explored the interconnectio n
between political economy, military expenditure and the reasons why great
powers rose and fell.76 Ultimately, the strength of Kennedy’s book did not derive
from its devastating logic or sparkling prose, but the sheer quantity of its
research combined with Kennedy’s very great skill in drawing out what he
thought were important, and presumably correct, lessons for the present from a
serious examination of the past: and what the past taught, he believed, was that
all great powers, including the USA, followed a similar if not identical trajectory.
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

Thus they rose in more or less the same way, they then consolidate d the territory
or space under their dominion and, after a lengthy period of time, they all
exhibited the same inclination to decline. The reason for this, according to
Kennedy, was also the same. Great powers were great initially by virtue of their
economic prowess. They then sought to become greater through expansion.
Expansion, however, involved ever-increasing costs. For a while these could be
sustained. But at some point the costs involved in policing and running a large
empire were bound to outweigh the beneŽ ts and, at that moment, the empire or
great power in question would begin to exhibit a tendency to decline. This was
almost, though not quite, a law of history. This is why the USA could easily go
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the same way as other states in the past. The USA might be different and
Kennedy was clear in his own mind that it was, but it was not so different. This
is why the detailed study of history was so important. It was not, as some might
have inferred from the number of Kennedy’s pages, a display in useless
erudition, nor was it because history was bound to repeat itself. Rather it was
because it showed us that what had happened to other great powers before could
easily happen to the USA in the not-so-distan t future
Kennedy’s message was hailed by many, ignored by few, and roundly
attacked by others who could never quite forgive what Walt Rostow termed this
‘Englishman translated to New Haven’ bearing ‘false historical analogies’.77
Kennedy, however, remained unrepentant, although he found that the next few
years of his life were spent having to defend both what he did say, as well as
what he did not. Thus, as he repeated almost ad nauseum, he never said, and was
quite careful not to say, that US decline was absolute. To use his own
terminology, it was ‘relative’. He also made it clear (but not quite so clear as he
should have done at the time) that the decline he was talking about was more
in terms of a prediction, rather than a description of the United States as it then
was. As he noted in his next book, his thesis did not refer to ‘today’ but to what
he called ‘a generation hence’.78 Nor was he claiming that decline was inevi-
table: it was merely possible.79 That aside, it was still perfectly obvious where
Kennedy stood in the larger debate about the United States. It might remain in
a class of its own economically and perhaps even militarily. It could never
descend to the level of a Holland, a Spain or even a UK. Nonetheless, it ran the
very real risk, as had other powers in the past, of its extensive commitments
outrunning its inevitably limited economic resources. Furthermore, because it
faced a series of other problems as well—indebtedness, uncompetitivenes s and
a growing budget deŽ cit—it had to address this issue sooner rather than later. If
it did not do so, then what might at best be a slow and smooth decline could
easily turn into something more dramatic and disturbing. America might be the
‘number one world power’ at the moment. But it appeared to him at least to be
drifting badly and, if it continued to do so, the future would be anything but
rosy. 80

Revivalists to the rescue or the empire strikes back?

If one of the results of Kennedy’s book was to make his publisher s a good deal
of money, another was to stir the oppositio n into life. Long before the
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 Michael Cox

appearance of the Kennedy volume with its speciŽ c argument about overexten-
sion and retrenchment, a quiet but intense series of sorties had been launched in
the journals and the specialised international relations literature against the idea
that Pax Americana was a thing of the past. Yet these attacks remained very
much within the conŽ nes of the academic world.81 The furore created by the
Kennedy book inevitably changed this and forced the debate out of the
classroom and into the public domain. In the process a number of quite different
questions, arising from quite different concerns, became inextricably mixed up.
The result was an amalgam of arguments that came from both liberals and
conservatives, committed Marxists and those at the heart of the American
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political class itself. Whether it added up to a coherent response to something

that was never especially coherent in the Ž rst place is by no means clear, but at
the end of the day a body of work was to accumulate that systematically
challenged the very notion that the USA was, or ever had been, in decline. While
the ‘revivalists’ (so-called) may have disagreed about many things, they did at
least agree about one thing: that the USA remained a very special type of power
and that to suggest otherwise was to misunderstand something very fundamental
about the postwar world.
The case against decline (like the case for) was based on several different
props. Perhaps some of the most sturdy were those hammered into the ground
by Susan Strange in a series of powerful intervention s against the declinists
authored in the 1980s. Strange’s lengthy career had witnessed many such
attacks on those she deemed to be wrong and muddle-headed. As she would
have been the Ž rst to admit, she was no stranger to controversy, nor was
she especially anti-American.82 She was merely annoyed by its academic
insularity and inane self-referential preoccupations . Amongst these she would
have almost certainly placed the decline thesis, a theory which she felt told
us far more about the sociology of knowledge and intellectual fashion in the
USA than it did about the United States itself. She was also worried about
its political implications . Although by no means uncritical of US economic
policy (far from it), she took the entirely pragmatic view that there was really
no alternative world leader. Her fear was that, if the decline thesis was ever
taken seriously by the gullible , it could create a climate of opinion that might
encourage the USA to act even less benevolently than it was already inclined
to do in international Ž nancial and monetary affairs. Moreover, and more
seriously, the whole debate about decline—or what she once referred to as this
American ‘weeping and wailing and wringing of hands over the fall of the
imperial republic’83—was premised on a confusion between the immediate and
the essential. Hence the declinists were not so much ignorant as superŽ cial and
confused, and they were especially superŽ cial and confused when it came to
the concept of structure. Thus, while it may have been true that the USA faced
some new problems from the 1960s onwards (primarily as a result of poor
leadership rather than basic  aws in the system84), this made not one iota of
difference to American structural power in the shape of the dollar, in the form
of its overwhelming military preponderance, in its control of key alliances
and, in spite of various jeremiads to the contrary, in its continued lead in the
more advanced technologies. To talk of decline, therefore, was not only
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

misleading, it was a myth; and according to Strange at least, a dangerous myth

at that.85
Stephen Gill attacked the problem from a rather different, Gramscian perspec-
tive. 86 While the case he made against the declinists rested in the Ž rst instance
upon a series of empirical refutations of the original thesis, his most original
contributio n to the debate was theoretical. While clearly sensitive to the fact that
there were different varieties of declinism, Gill in the end felt that the idea of
decline itself was primarily a realist construct. As such, it took as its point of
departure the centrality of the nation-state as the main factor and the principal
actor in internationa l politics. By so doing, those so in uenced were bound to
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arrive at only one conclusion, for, assessed in simple comparative terms, it was
self-evident that the economic position of the USA relative to its competitors had
diminished quite measurably since the high point at the end of the Second World
War. But this obvious ‘fact’ ignored a rather more important development: the
shift that had taken place from one economic period when the state had been the
dominant and distinct unit of account in a competitive world economy made up
of discrete political entities, to another when the distinction between the
domestic and the international had been obliterated by the transnationalisatio n of
the global economy. This not only changed the relationship between the state
and the world economic system, but also altered the way in which we should
understand the concept of hegemony itself. Indeed, if we conceived of hegemony
not just in terms of the possessions of any one power, but rather the developed
practices of the international economic system as a whole, it could easily be
argued that the USA—precisely because of its continued ‘structural domination’
within that system—had not suffered very much decline at all. Nor was this all.
Because the USA also possessed many forms of what Gill went on to deŽ ne as
‘structural power’ in the shape of a dynamic economy, a vast military apparatus
and a multicultural society which mirrored the world at large in ways that other
countries did not, it was quite wrong to think of the USA as being under any
serious threat. Even the English language represented a major asset and, as it
increasingly became the lingua franca of global commerce and international
politics, this too would work to the country’s advantage in a world more and
more shaped by transnationa l capital and transnationalise d values.87
Another line of attack was opened up Joseph Nye, an established academic
with in uence at the highest levels of the Democratic Party whose primary
purpose, one suspects, was not just to debate the declinists but to in uence
political opinion in a certain direction. The published result was something
very much like Nye himself: balanced, fair and moderate. Yet he did agree with
Gill on at least one thing: that the declinist thesis was misjudged, not just
because it was empirically unsound, but because it conceived of power, and thus
decline, in a state-centric fashion that no longer made a great deal of sense in
an increasingly interdependent world.88 Nye, however, was not prepared to
abandon the insights of realism completely. In fact, for one of the more active
liberals in the world of international relations (and later in the Clinton adminis-
tration) he made much use of the concept of national power in his pursuit of the
declinist foe. He did so, Ž rstly, by challenging the truism that the United States
exercised hegemonic control in the years just after the Second World War. This
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 Michael Cox

he believed not only tended to overstate the magnitude of US power in the

postwar period, but also inclined others, including the declinists, to exaggerate
the extent to which that power had eroded 25 and 30 years on. By any measure,
the USA continued to possess a good deal of what Nye liked to term ‘hard’
power (in the shape of military and economic capabilities) as well as soft power
(in the form of important ideological and cultural assets). Finally, the declinists
in his view failed to provide a complete picture of the balance of power. Again,
things were not as bad as the pessimists assumed. Japan was a one-dimensiona l
great power with little military clout and even less ideological appeal; Europe
still remained a series of states with no collective strength in the larger
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international system; and the USSR was reeling from its own contradictions.
There was no reason to be downcast. The USA had both the capacity and the
desire to lead. Indeed, as the title of his book made clear, it was bound to do so.89
If Nye’s was one of the more liberal responses to Kennedy, Samuel Hunting-
ton’s turned out to be one of the more abrasive. A close associate of Zbigniew
Brzezinski and soon-to-be author the notion of the ‘clash of civilizations ’,
Huntington was not about to take any prisoners. Thus whereas Nye aimed to
puncture and hurt the ‘Englishman’ with his mild-mannered rebukes of
Kennedy’s otherwise ‘thoughtful effort to capture the current mood in the United
States’ 90 (he later noted that Kennedy was a ‘Ž ne historian’ who was unfortu-
nately lured into ‘some political science in the last chapter’ of his book),91
Huntington seemed to regard him and his ilk as the enemy within, spreading
despondency and dismay amongst the troops, and decided to treat them as such.
The result was a tough-minded broadside that combined vitriol and sharp insight
about the unique features of the United States in equal measure. Huntington’s
forceful celebration of American exceptionalism was matched in turn by an
equally Ž erce repudiation of the main declinist claims. Many of the so-called
symptoms of decline were in fact plain invention, he insisted, and he proceeded
to swot them down, one by one. First, the budget deŽ cit: this was not
insigniŽ cant he accepted, but was in the process of being reduced through
careful Ž scal management. Next came the USA’s declining share of the world
product. This he maintained had remained remarkably stable between 1970 and
1990. Finally, he turned to US power more generally. Once again, there was far
less to be worried about than the declinists believed. As Huntington put it, the
USA was a ‘peculiarly multi-dimensional ’ power whose position within the
larger internationa l system remained central. Wherein therefore lay the danger?
The answer basically was from within, from those who had little understandin g
of international realities. Still, the USA had much to thank the declinists for, if
not for providing an accurate picture of the world in all of its complexity, then
at least for helping to mobilise US public opinion at key moments in time. In this
rather ironic way, the declinists, he concluded, seemed to play an almost
‘indispensable role in preventing’ the very thing they took to be inevitable.92
But what of the original Kennedy thesis about imperial overstretch? This, after
all, was his own very distinct contributio n to the larger decline debate, and not
surprisingl y provoked some of the strongest comment from critics. One such
came from the noted historian Aaron Friedberg in an assessment which, if
nothing else, did at least concede two of the declinist points: that the US share
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

of total world product had fallen since the late 1940s, and that the United States
was no longer as dominant in the manufacture and sale of high technology
products as it had once been. However, Friedberg remained unconvinced about
the rest of the Kennedy thesis. In his view, it fundamentally misunderstoo d the
relationship between economics and strategy. Not only was this more subtle than
Kennedy implied, but in the US case at least there was really no need for a major
strategic rethink, partly because the economy remained so vibrant, but more
obviously because the ‘imperial’ burden was too small to compel such a move.93
As another critic pointed out, the USA was now spending less in percentage
terms on national security than at any time since the 1950s. So why the urge to
retrench? 94 Why in fact take Kennedy seriously at all? A White House ofŽ cial—
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Richard Haass—explained one of the reasons in a powerful political intervention

masquerading as a review article.95 The problem with Kennedy, he believed, was
not that he dabbled in history, but that he pontiŽ cated about the present and
future. No doubt his re ections about the past were interesting enough, but this
was not the issue. It was the way that Kennedy then employed history that
worried Haass. For if enough people were convinced that his general thesis was
right, and that retrenchment was necessary in order to prevent US decline, then
this could easily lead to a dangerous ‘self-fulŽ lling prophecy’ that would
encourage indiscriminat e defence cuts and weaken US credibility abroad. A
knowledge of history was always useful, of course; however, in Kennedy’s
hands, ‘a lot of history’, it turned out, seemed to be a ‘dangerous thing’. For this
reason (there were others), his misguided views had to be taken seriously and
rebutted by all those determined to keep the USA strong.96

The new American hegemony, or whatever happened to American decline?

The case against decline, therefore, was as complex and diverse as was the
original argument in favour of it. Combining as it did a theoretical defence of
the USA as a special kind of great power, an empirical reassessment of US
capabilities in a changing world and a sustained political assault from the
conservative right, now emboldened by over a decade of Republican rule, the
revivalists must have felt that they had badly wounded their opponents, and they
had. Not that the ‘declinists’ surrendered every position. Kennedy, for example,
continued to defend his original corner and in his next book warned those who
might have thought otherwise that the dollar was by no means unassailable.97 A
year earlier the respected commentator, David Calleo, had explored the ways in
which the federal deŽ cit (made worse in his view by ‘Reaganomics’) was slowly
pulling the country down.98 A number of economists meanwhile continued to
point to US lack of competitiveness,99 a radical historian to the onset of a new
American recession in 1990,100 those of a more nationalisti c bent to the
economic threat still represented by Japan,101 and one or two mavericks to what
they saw as the almost Third World standards present in many US cities.102 The
American dream and with it American hegemony were still in doubt, even in
spite (and possibly because) of Reagan’s eight years in ofŽ ce followed by
George Bush’s four.103
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 Michael Cox

But the tide was deŽ nitely turning. No doubt one of the reasons for this was
the sheer force of the attack launched against Kennedy and the declinist thesis
more generally. Any argument manhandled quite as brutally as this one was not
likely to come out the other end entirely unscathed—and nor did it. But this was
not the only factor. More important, by far, was the fact that the world itself was
beginning to change and, as it did so, seemed to refute in practice what the
declinists had been saying in their different theoretical ways for the past 20
years. Indeed, as the world started to alter, so too did intellectual fashion, and
many in time began to wonder why there had been so much fuss in the Ž rst
place. Bruce Cumings expressed this mood shift almost perfectly. A radical critic
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in his own right, Cumings could not have been more scathing. Re ecting on the
eve of the new millennium, he could but wonder at it all, and how it was that
so many words about the end of the American century, much of it ‘nonsense’ in
his view, could be written by so many apparently intelligent people about a
future which turned out to be almost the opposite of what had been predicted.
It was to him something of a mystery.104
The argument that the declinists got it wrong and the so-called ‘revivalists’
got it right is certainly a persuasive one, but it begs two very obvious
questions—about what it was the declinists got wrong exactly and what it is the
revivalists actually got right. There is little doubt that the latter scored some
powerful points against their opponents. However, to read the likes of Strange
or Huntington, one could easily come away thinking that the whole thing was a
charade; that there had been no crisis of conŽ dence at home, no Vietnam War,
no genuine fears about what was happening in the Third World, no Soviet
Union, no collapse of the larger Bretton Woods system and no failure of nerve
within the US foreign policy elite for a while. It is almost as if a critical moment
in American history had never really happened, indeed that the debate itself
should never have really happened. Furthermore, even if we were to accept that
the revivalists got a good deal right, there is one thing that even they did not
foresee: namely, the resurgence of US power in the last decade of the twentieth
century. There is an obvious reason why. Like nearly all other analysts, they
never entertained the idea of the Cold War coming to an end, followed two years
later by the disintegratio n of the Soviet Union.105 It was this quite unexpected
turn of events—not the speciŽ ties of US power—that transformed the world and
in the process laid the foundation for US resurgence in the 1990s.
There were a number of ways in which the unforeseen dissolutio n of the
‘other’ turned the world upside down. The Ž rst, quite simply, was by demon-
strating in practice that planning and the conscious attempt to organise society
other than through the mechanism of the market was bound to lead to disaster.
A new civilisatio n had been built in Soviet Russia which promised the earth.
However, instead of creating abundance and freedom, it had only produced
deprivation and totalitarianism . Consequently it had been consigned—where
Reagan said it would be consigned back in 1982—on to the trash-heap of
history, a timely reminder and warning to everybody that this was the fate
awaiting all those who tampered with the basic laws of economics. The
implosion of ofŽ cial communism on a global scale also made possible something
which had hitherto been impossible: the creation of a truly ‘open door’ world
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

economic system in which there were no barriers standing in the way of the free
movement of capital. Indeed, in one very critical sense, the collapse of the
‘Second’ communist world, with its inevitable knock-on effects in the ‘Third
World’, only accelerated those pre-existing tendencies that were leading to that
most important of modern economic phenomenon with which the United States
in particular has been identiŽ ed—globalisation . Some would even insist that,
without the end of the Cold War, and with it the collapse of closed systems,
globalisatio n in its modern form would have been inconceivable. Finally, with
the slow decline and subsequent fall of Soviet power, the most serious source of
organised state resistance to US power was at last removed. At a stroke, this
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changed the context of world politics and gave the United States a degree of
strategic choice it had not had during the whole post-1945 period. How it sought
to exploit this novel situation became only too apparent in 1991 when it
overwhelmed Iraqi forces with hardly a murmur emanating from Baghdad’s
traditiona l ally in Moscow. It was revealed yet again a few years later when the
USA gave the go-ahead for the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo, whose human
consequences were perhaps less signiŽ cant than the fact that it occurred in the
Ž rst place. In an earlier era where the international environment had been less
benign, such an action would have been inconceivable .
If the establishment of a unipolar world without serious oppositio n within it
to the United States laid the basis for American self-conŽ dence in the 1990s,106
the long boom which began in 1992 and continued more or less without
disturbance until the ‘troubles’ of 2001 gave it material meaning. Here the
revivalists could obviously claim some foresight, but again we have to be
careful. They might have understood some of the underlying strengths of the US
economy better than the declinists, but this does not explain why the economy
surged so dramatically after a period of relative inactivity. It may well have been
more likely, given the USA’s ‘natural’ structural advantages, but there were
other agency factors at work too, including the Clinton administratio n itself
whose focus on economic renewal and stress on the need to compete in a
globalise d economy played a critical part in generating a good deal of the
activity which followed. Without its intervention , it is difŽ cult to envisage what
then happened as investment soared and Wall Street surged to new highs
following a period of expansion that continued for a record 107 consecutive
months. In the process, Clinton even managed to eliminate the most obvious
symptom of US economic weakness in the past—the budget deŽ cit—the Ž rst
president to do so since 1969. Symbolically, this was of major importance, as
Clinton well understood when announcing the good news in 1998. The USA had
at last moved, he noted, from a ‘red’ period of deŽ cits to a ‘black’ era of
surpluses. This was not only good for America, he observed, but good for the
world as a whole. It was also the most effective answer possible to those who
had only a few years earlier been predicting further US decline. In the new US
economy of the 1990s things that would have seemed inconceivable and
improbable before now looked eminently easy. The only way forward it seemed
was up and then up again.107
This brings us then to the third source of the new American hegemony: the
collapse of the idea of the ‘PaciŽ c Century’ and with it the almost complete
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 Michael Cox

disintegratio n of the once popular (or unpopular) view that Japan represented a
serious threat to US economic hegemony.108 Once held up as a rival form of
capitalism that could not only compete with the United States but beat it, by the
end of the decade Japan looked less like the proverbial rising sun and more like
a crippled giant. The transformation was truly extraordinary. In the early 1990s
most experts—though not all—were still speculating in sometimes frenzied ways
about the peculiarities of the Japanese ‘way’ and the menace this represented to
the USA. A few years on, and such talk sounded like so much idle chatter.
Certainly by the turn of the century, few serious analysts could see very much
to be worried about, and none anticipated Japan displacing the USA as the
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technological hegemon. This was clearly the view of an important report

published in Japan itself in 1999.109 It was also the opinion of an American study
which appeared a year earlier. As it showed, the USA was still far ahead in all
Ž ve of the most crucial sectors of the new information economy. In semiconduc-
tors, American Ž rms even reclaimed both their technological edge and market
share from Japanese companies, except in the low-end memory chip part of the
market. Meanwhile, in microprocessors, US Ž rms tightened their control of
the global market, they dominated in the more lucrative software markets and,
in the latest surge in information technology prompted by the internet and the
World Wide Web, the USA simply left Japan trailing in its wake. By the turn
of the century the Japanese technological challenge had all but evaporated.110
This in turn raises the question of Europe. Certainly if Japan presented a very
different picture at the end of the 1990s than it had at the beginning of the
decade, the same could easily be said of the European Union (EU) as it coped
in turn with the costs of German uniŽ cation, the multilayered process of
transition in the East, EU enlargement and further economic integration around
its new currency, the euro. In no way did any of these changes seriously impinge
on the basics of power in the larger international system. If anything, at the level
of high politics, the 1990s tended to conŽ rm US hegemony in the region rather
than diminish it.111 The most obvious reason for this was Europe’s disastrous
showing in Bosnia. Having been left the problem to resolve by an American
administratio n reluctant to get involved in the Balkans quagmire, US policy
gradually moved from one of containment to engagement, to full-scale involve-
ment, as it became clear that the European states could not resolve the situation
themselves. Determined to reach a Balkan settlement at all cost, it was the USA
that brokered the deal which Ž nally led to some sort of peace. The fact that it
was signed in Dayton, Ohio and not Rome, Paris or Brussels, tells its own
particular story about the balance of power in the ‘new’ Europe.112 So too did
the wider debates then taking place about the future of European security. The
precise details of how the USA moved from reasoned opposition to the idea of
NATO enlargement in 1990, to ready acceptance of its necessity four to Ž ve
years later, is a story that has been told many times before. SufŽ ce to say here
that it was, in the end, a US decision, taken in Washington, by US policy
makers, the signiŽ cance of which was not lost on those like the French who had
earlier argued strongly for a new set of security arrangements that might in the
end provide a European answer to European problems. With NATO expansion
it was clear that no such answer had been forthcoming and that the United States
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 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

would remain the critical factor in the new, or perhaps not so new, European
security order.113
Finally, any assessment of the new American hegemony has to take account
of that most important instrument of power—the military capabilities needed to
deter enemies, control allies, preserve in uence and, if needs be, win wars. Here
the collapse of the USSR and the inability of other countries to justify military
spending to sceptical publics only emphasised the extent of US preponderance.
A crude, but accurate, measure of this was that in every year after 1992 the
United States alone accounted for nearly 40 per cent of all the world’s military
expenditure. By the year 2000 it was spending just over US$280 billion on its
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‘defence’, in real terms only 14 per cent less than in an average year during the
Cold War itself. In comparison to its many dependent allies (and largely
backward rivals) it was simply in a league of its own. Nor was this all. Half of
all arms sales—close to US$55 billion in 1998—were American. It was the
biggest manufacturer of conventional weapons and its military R&D was seven
times higher than that of France, its closest competitor.114 It was also one of the
very few countries whose defence budget began to go up, rather than down, in
the 1990s. Secretary of Defense William Cohen outlined the reasons why in
1997. After 10 years of cuts, he explained, it was imperative to raise spending
on the military. The Cold War might have come to an end, but so too, he added,
had the post-Cold-War era. We were now living in different and more difŽ cult
times, and the moment was ripe therefore for a new defence policy appropriate
to the potentially long-lastin g conditions of acute uncertainty. Moreover, without
such a policy, he argued, the United States would be unable to provide the sort
of leadership essential for global order. As an earlier and much-quoted defence
review of 1992 had made clear, the USA was not like other powers. It had wider
international responsibilities , and these required a force structure capable of
ensuring its continued dominance in the world—not just to deter likely enemies,
but also to send an unambiguousl y clear message to more friendly regional
players that the United States would not countenance any challenge to its
hegemony. Much might have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
end of the USSR, but one thing had not: the US urge to remain number one.115

Conclusion: hegemony without contradiction?

We thus come full circle, or so it would seem, from Henry Luce and the idea
of the American century as expressed on the eve of the Second World War, to
the new American hegemony as it has unfolded in the 10-year period since the
end of the Cold War. In the process, we have been concerned to examine at least
three connected issues: the initial failure of international relations as an academic
discourse to anticipate the renewal of US power in the 1990s, and this in spite
of the fact that many writers never took the argument about decline seriously in
the Ž rst place; the quite remarkable extent to which the discussion about decline
set the terms of intellectua l debate within the United States for the better part of
20 years; and the equally important ways in which discourses about decline
culminating with the publication of Paul Kennedy’s book impacted upon the
perceptions of policy makers. As we have tried to show, decline was not just
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 Michael Cox

some academic side-show, but central to the discussions which divided the USA
after the 1960s. In many ways, at the heart of the great debate about the future
of US foreign policy after 1968 was not just a single argument about the USSR
and how best to contain it, but an even more signiŽ cant narrative about the
condition of US power and how it might best be restored. To many, in fact, it
was the deŽ ning problem around which all others revolved. Such an obsession
might look faintly odd from the perspective of the new century. Two or three
decades earlier it looked anything but, and we need to remember that fact lest
we end up deleting one of the more signiŽ cant debates from postwar US history.
But the debate was Ž nally resolved, and at the beginning of the new
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millennium US hegemony looks more secure than ever. As John Ikenberry has
noted, ‘Ž fty years after it emerged hegemonic, the United States is still the
dominant world power at the centre of a relatively stable and expanding
democratic capitalist order’.116 This is perfectly true, except in one major respect.
American power, and the world that power helped to create, has not just been
preserved, but in many important ways is now more complete than it was back
in 1941 or even 1945. After all, in the period since Luce authored his
much-quoted article, two potent enemies in the shape of Germany and Japan
have been defeated, large parts of the world have been remade in the image of
America, the ideological alternative in the shape of communism has been seen
off, the Third World challenge has come and gone, the other superpower has
collapsed, US-in uenced multilateral institution s have been set up and continue
to  ourish, and everywhere it seems people are more in uenced by American
ideas, American idioms, American culture and even by the idea of America
itself. The change is immense. Who, for example, would have had the gall to
have written a study in the immediate post-Vietnam era on the next American
century? By the late 1990s, however, there were all manner of studies talking
about precisely that. Indeed, one of the more interesting was published in 1996
with the arresting statement on its cover which did not ask, but simply asserted
that The 21st Century Will Be American. That it was written by a Latin
American radical, and not a member of the National Security Council, made the
title all the more telling.117
Of course, this is not to confuse hegemony with omnipotence, nor is it to
assume that hegemony always translates into a coherent foreign policy. If it did,
then we would not be hearing so many complaints from informed Americans
about the USA now having no grand strategy.118 United States power may have
been reconstituted in the 1990s. However, this does not make policy choices any
the more simple or the international order any the less complex. Certainly, in a
world without a clear threat uniting dependent states around the USA’s protec-
tive mantle, where the other major actors (with the exception of the USSR) have
more capabilities than they had in the Ž rst 25 years of the postwar period, and
in which the rapid movement of money and capital outside the control of
governments have made things far more difŽ cult to manage, US power cannot
be deployed as it once could in an age when the USA confronted a well-deŽ ned
enemy and controlled well over half of the world’s economic resources, and
when most economic activity tended to coincide with that entity we call the
nation-state . All this much is self-evident. However, hegemony can take several
332
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

forms and not just one, and if we accept that it is not just about controlling
everything, but sustaining an environment which is consonant with one’s broader
economic and security interests, then, by any measure, it has to be said that the
United States today is in an especially favourable situation. Indeed, if we agree
with Robert Cox that hegemony at the international level is not merely an order
among states but also an order at the level of the internationa l system with ‘a
dominant mode of production which penetrates into all countries’, which
connects ‘all social classes’ under conditions where the rules of the economic
game do not seem to be imposed but appear to be ‘natural’, then in our modern
globalise d world where there is no other game in town other than the market,
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where liberal democracy has become the new political gold standard of the age,
and where few but the most optimistic can see a way beyond the present set of
economic arrangements, then we have to accept that US hegemony has never
been more secure.119 For those seeking to change the world, this may be an
unpalatable conclusion, but even radical critics have to start from where the
world happens to be, rather than where they would like it to be, and currently
that world from where the United States happens to be sitting looks less
threatening, more open and less hostile to American values than at any time in
modern history.120
This is turn raises two obvious questions: can this hegemony continue and, if
it does, what then are the implications for the future? Let us complete our
discussion with a brief answer to both questions. The future of US hegemony is
invariably posed in terms of a simple realist question: namely, who or what will
emerge to challenge, balance, or even overthrow the current status quo? Three
candidates are invariably mentioned—a rising China, a renascent Russia and a
‘turbo-charged’ Europe,121 but there must be grave doubts on each count. China
may have regional presence and enormous economic potential, but it simply does
not stand in the same league as the United States, and will not do so for decades
to come.122 Russia is an even less likely candidate as hegemonic challenger with
its declining military assets and an economy that has been in free fall throughout
the 1990s. While Europe undoubtedly has huge material resources, it has neither
the political capacity nor the military capability to challenge the United States,
nor is it likely to do so, and for a very good reason which really takes us to the
hub of the problem. For while there are many who might not like the present
distribution of power in the international system, they are not insensitive to
the fact that there is much more to be gained by working within an American-
dominated club, than trying to work outside of it. Indeed, that is precisely why
China and Russia are both now trying to join it. Moreover, in spite of some of
its less attractive features as a hegemon, the United States has been wise enough,
most of the time (though not all of the time), to exercise its hegemony in such
a way so as to share the spoils with those prepared to abide by the rules. Its
hegemony has thus been a relatively benign one in which all but the most
intransigent, like Iraq, or regional disturbers of the peace, like Serbia under
Milosevic, will get something rather than nothing if they choose the cooperative
route. Hence, there is little likelihood of a new state or constellation of states
rising up to challenge the United States, not just because the dangers involved
in doing so are too great, or because American power is currently so overwhelm-
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 Michael Cox

ing, but because the beneŽ ts of continued cooperation, especially under condi-
tions of deepening globalisation , so outweigh the costs of threatening US
hegemony that hostility would simply not be in the interests of any ‘normal’
state. 123
If this is true, then what about the future? Here we have to draw out the logic
of our somewhat revisionist argument and conclude, with others, that there is no
practical or theoretical reason why the twenty-Ž rst century should not be just as
American—if not more so—than the twentieth. However, there is no such thing
as hegemony without contradiction ,124 and three issues are likely to confront the
United States as it moves forward: one derives from the limits of the American
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boom itself, the other from the fairly self-evident legitimacy problems now
facing contemporary globalisation , and the third from resentments that might
easily develop over time to a United States whose actions, although seen by
itself as being benevolent, are often regarded by others as anything but. There
is no need to be apocalyptic, but the storm clouds are already gathering. In 1998,
Asia PaciŽ c entered a dark economic tunnel from which it has still not emerged.
In the same year, Russia and Latin America together experienced a Ž nancial
crash. A year later, the ‘Battle for Seattle’ forced the issue of globalisatio n on
to the larger political agenda. In 2000 George W. Bush was elected to the White
House on a narrowly deŽ ned platform that appeared to place US interests above
all others. In early 2001 the great engine called the US economy began to slow
down. None of this is likely to lead to new revolutions , wars or even trade wars.
To that extent the world has changed a great deal and has done so in large part
because of the success of the US hegemonic project. However, a serious erosion
in economic conŽ dence in the United States, in the context of further critical
questions being asked about the distributio n of economic beneŽ ts in a globalised
world now led by a country that to some at least looks increasingly like a selŽ sh,
rather than a cooperative, hegemon, could easily generate a new round of soul
searching. While this is unlikely to lead to yet another protracted debate about
American power, it could—if the economic situation deteriorates far enough and
for long enough—undermine the new American self-conŽ dence and set off a
new, and equally potent, discussion about promises made and promises broken
so early in the new American century.

Notes
Earlier and much shorter versions of this paper have been given at different points over the last few years,
including at the US Embassy in London and the Political Economy Research Centre at the University of
ShefŽ eld in 1998. The most recent outing of the same argument was the Ž fth in a series of 10 Millennium
Public Lectures delivered at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth on 18 May 2000. Here I would like to
thank Professor Ken Booth of Aberystwyth for prompting me to give the lecture and Professor Anthony Payne
for suggesting some useful revisions to my original submission.
1. On the failure to anticipate the end of the Cold War by those presumed to understand one of its
protagonists best, see the essays collected in my Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, the Death
of Communism and the New Russia (Pinter, 1998).
2. See Moises Nam, ‘Editor’s Note’, Foreign Policy, No. 110 (1998), pp. 9–11.
3. Realist and liberal efforts to understand the new world can be found in Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry
& Takashi Inoguchi (eds), American Democracy Promotion: Strategies, Impacts, Outcomes (Oxford
University Press, 2000).

334
 Whatever Happened to American Decline?

4. For a useful guide to these debates, see Michael Doyle & G. John Ikenberry (Eds), New Thinking in
International Relations Theory (Westview, 1997). For an exposition of what Barry Buzan has called ‘the
new international relations’, see Iver B. Neumann & Ole Waever (Eds), The Future of International
Relations: Masters in the Making (Routledge, 1997).
5. For the most thoughtful discussion on the subject, see the highly original Steffano Guzzini, Realism in
International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold
(Routledge, 1998).
6. For a useful overview of international relations before the ‘fall’, see Kal Holsti, ‘The study of
international politics during the Cold War’, in: Tim Dunne, Ken Booth & Michael Cox (Eds), The Eighty
Years’ Crisis: International Relations 1919–1999 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17–46.
7. I explore this issue in ‘The end of the Cold War and why we failed to predict it’, in: Allen Hunter (Ed.),
Rethinking the Cold War (Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 157–74.
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8. See Richard Wyn Jones, Critical Theory and World Politics (Lynne Rienner, 2001) on the normative
‘turn’ in international relations after the Cold War.
9. Whether realism had ever been adequate as an intellectual tool is explored in John Vasquez, The Power
of Power Politics: A Critique (Pinter, 1983).
10. There were still a few who remained devotees of realism. See, for example, the essays collected in Etian
B. Kapstein & Michael Mastanduno (Eds), Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold
War (Columbia University Press, 1999).
11. The retreat from ‘power’ in international relations analysis was also accompanied by attacks on the notion
of hegemony, and by implication the theory of hegemonic stability. While these critiques predated the
end of the Cold War, they were certainly given a further boost by it. For the case against hegemonic
stability, see inter alia John A.C. Conybeare, ‘Public Goods, Prisoner’s Dilemmas and the International
Political Economy’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1984), pp. 5–22; Duncan Snidal
‘The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory’, International Organization, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1985), pp.
579–614; and David A. Lake, ‘Leadership, Hegemony, and the International Economy: Naked Emperor
or Tattered Monarch with Potential’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4 (1993), pp. 459–89.
12. In his attack on those in international relations who persist in attacking ‘state-centric’ account s of world
politics, Alexander Wendt observes: ‘States are still the primary medium through which the effects of
other actors are channeled into the world system’ and it ‘makes no more sense to criticize a theory of
international politics as being “state centric” as it does to criticize a theory of forests for being “tree
centric” ’. See his in uential Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
p. 9.
13. On what she calls the phenomeno n of ‘state denial’ in modern international relations, see Linda Weiss,
The Myth of the Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Polity Press, 1998), esp. pp.
2–3.
14. Most of the more insightful work written in the 1990s on the US role in the world tended to come from
two types of ‘outsiders’: non-Americans or radical Americans. See, in particular, Geir Lundestad, The
American ‘Empire’ (Norwegian University Press, 1990); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States
Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Mark Rupert,
Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power (Cambridge
University Press, 1995); and William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention,
and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
15. Some of the best US diplomatic history on the period has been written by diplomats themselves or those
close to the diplomatic community. The most useful work thus far has either been on US policy towards
Germany or on the negotiations that led to the end of the Cold War itself. See Paul Zelikow &
Condoleeza Rice, Germany UniŽ ed and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Harvard University
Press, 1995) and Michael Beschloss & Strobe Talbott, At The Highest Level: The Inside Story of the End
of the Cold War (Little, Brown, 1993).
16. The most in uential radical writer on American foreign relations remains Noam Chomsky. Perhaps his
most mature re ections are collected in Deterring Democracy (Vintage, 1992).
17. On the extent to which many American academics continue to feel a compulsion to bridge the gap
between theory and foreign policy, see the instructive volume by Miroslav Nincic & Joseph Lepgold (Eds),
Being Useful: Policy Relevance and International Relations Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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 Michael Cox

18. See, for example, Steven Hurst, The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration: In Search of a New
World Order (Cassell, 1999).
19. See, for example, Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (Council
on Foreign Relations, 1997).
20. See David L. Boren & Edward J. Perkins (Eds), Preparing America’s Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) and Bruce W. Jantelson, American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics
of Choice in the 21st Century (Norton, 2000).
21. See Bruce Cumings, ‘Still the American Century’, in: Michael Cox, Ken Booth & Tim Dunne (Eds), The
Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics 1989–1999 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.
271–99.
22. The concept of hegemony is an elusive one. The classic deŽ nition derives from the Greek term
(hegemonia) which means leadership, as distinct to control (arkhe). But to lead presuppose s overwhelm-
ing power, and some analysts have therefore used the term to denote dominance . In this article I use the
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term in both senses insofar as they cannot be usefully separated, but accept that in the end it is the role
of the USA in the international system, and not just its capabilities, which is critical.
23. A point made by Susan Strange in her ‘The Future of the American Empire’, Journal of International
Affairs, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1988), pp. 1–18.
24. ‘We are all Yankees now’, proclaimed one British liberal newspaper on the eve of the new millennium.
See ‘Planet USA’, The Guardian, G2, 8 November 1999.
25. Henry Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life, 17 February 1941, pp. 61–5. On Luce’s career, see James
L. Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Twayne, 1987).
26. Figures taken from Alan L. Gropman, Mobilizing US Industry in World War II (Institute for National
Strategic Studies, 1996), p. 3.
27. The extent of Soviet weakness after the war was understood at the time, but later forgotten once the Cold
War was underway. For an excellent contemporar y assessment of the fragility of the Soviet position after
1945, see the series in the London Economist on 15, 22 and 29 March 1947.
28. For an excellent description of the US power position in 1945, see Donald W. White, ‘The Nature of
World Power in American History: An Evaluation at the End of World War Two’, Diplomatic History,
Vol. 11, No. 3 (1987), pp. 181–202.
29. A point made with some force by John L. Gaddis in his justly important The Long Peace: Inquiries into
the History of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1987).
30. The best book on the origins of the Cold War, based on superb scholarship, remains Melvyn Lef er, A
Preponderanc e of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Origins of the Cold War
(Stanford University Press, 1992).
31. See Alan P. Dobson, ‘The USA, Britain, and the question of hegemony ’, in: Geir Lundestad (Ed.), No
End to Alliance: The United States and Western Europe—Past, Present and Future (Macmillan, 1999),
pp. 134–63
32. See Peter Burnham’s most original The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction (St Martin’s Press,
1990).
33. See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, ‘Rethinking the Origins of American Hegemony’, Political Science
Quarterly, No. 104 (1989), pp. 375–400; and J.G. Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and
change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order’, in: Stephen Krasner (Ed.), International
Regimes (Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 195–231.
34. For a brief, sympatheti c guide to the question of hegemonic stability by one of its more celebrated
advocates, see Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understandin g the International Economic
Order (Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 97–102.
35. A point forcefully made by Gabriel Kolko & Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United
States Foreign Policy 1945–1954 (Harper & Row, 1973).
36. The  aw in the international political economy literature on ‘hegemonic stability’ is not that the thesis
is wrong per se about the US role after the Second World War, but that it usually fails to relate the
economic dimensions of hegemony to the political and the strategic context, a point recognised by
Michael C. Webb & Stephen Krasner, in their ‘Hegemonic Stability Theory: An Empirical Assessment’,
Review of International Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1989), pp. 183–98.
37. For the classic, alternative view, see Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951
(University of California Press, 1984).
38. This is shown quite clearly in William R. Nester, Japan’s Growing Power over East Asia and the World
Economy: Means and Ends (Macmillan, 1990), pp. 13–45.

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39. For a different perspective, see William Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perception during
the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 184–222.
40. I have discussed this in many places before, but see in particular my ‘Western capitalism and the Cold
War system’, in: Martin Shaw (Ed.), War, State & Society (Macmillan Press, 1984), pp. 156–62, and ‘The
Cold War and Stalinism in the Age of Capitalist Decline’, Critique, No. 17 (1986), esp. pp. 47–50.
41. See William O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New York Times
Books, 1971).
42. On the background to these changes, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope. Days of Rage (Bantam
Books, 1993) and Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
(Oxford University Press, 2000).
43. This reading about the climate of ‘declinism’ in the United States draws from some of the ideas put
forward by Richard English and Mike Kenny in their work on British decline. See their Rethinking British
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Decline (Macmillan, 2000), esp. pp. 279–99. See also their ‘Intellectuals and British decline’, 2 June
1999, unpublishe d ms, 30 pp.
44. For an economic analysis of the 1970s by two writers who later became part of the Clinton White House,
see Ira C. Magaziner & Robert B. Reich, Minding America’s Business: The Decline and Rise of the
American Economy (Vintage Books, 1983).
45. Figures from John E. Schwarz, The Illusion of Opportunity: The American Dream in Question (W.W.
Norton, 1997), esp. pp. 88–96.
46. For background , see David Obey & Paul Sarbanes (Eds), The Changing American Economy (Blackwell,
1986).
47. Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy; Political Contradictions of Contemporar y Capitalism (Free Press,
1977), pp. 322–47.
48. See Phil Cerny, ‘Political Entropy and American Decline’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies,
Vol. 18, No. 1 (1989), pp. 47–63.
49. On this, see I.M. Destler, Leslie Gelb & Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of
American Foreign Policy (Simon & Schuster, 1984).
50. See Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger (Pluto Press, 1983). For
a brilliant analysis of Reagan as a prophet of renewal after a period of American decline, see Joel Krieger,
Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline (Polity Press, 1986), pp. 109–86.
51. Of the many intellectual attempts to sell decline to the American people as a way of justifying
Reaganism, the best by far is Bruce Nussbaum et al., The Decline of U.S. Power (and What We Can Do
About It) (Houghton Mif in, 1980).
52. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Blackwell, 1993).
53. See my US Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Superpowe r without a Mission? (Pinter, 1995).
54. For the best assessment of the economic costs of Vietnam, see Robert Warren Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim
Realities: The Economic Consequence s of the Vietnam War (New Viewpoints, 1976).
55. See my early assessment of this in ‘From Détente to the New Cold War: The crisis of the Cold War
System’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1984), pp. 265–91.
56. For a brief but useful overview of the rise and fall of the postwar liberal economi c order, see Robert
Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism; The World Economy in The 21st Century (Princeton
University Press, 2000), pp. 15–87.
57. Quote from Otto Newman & Richard de Zoyse, The American Dream in the Information Age (Macmillan
1999), p. 24.
58. For a balanced assessment, see Bruce R. Scott & George C. Lodge (Eds), US Competitiveness in the
World Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1985).
59. A point made by Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt
to Reagan and Beyond (Touchstone, 1985), pp. 180–1.
60. See Fred Block, The Origins of the International Economic Disorder (University of California Press,
1977), pp. 164–225; and E.A. Brett, The World Economy since the War: The Politics of Uneven
Development (Macmillan, 1985), pp. 105–31.
61. See, for example, Lester Thurrow, The Zero-Sum Solution: The Route to Economic Growth (Penguin,
1987), p. 10.
62. See Henry Brandon, The Retreat of American Power (Doubleday 1973); and David P. Calleo, The
Imperious Economy (Harvard University Press, 1982).

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63. See Richard Rosecrance (Ed.), America as an Ordinary Country: US Foreign Policy and the Future
(Cornell University Press, 1976); and Kenneth Oye, D. Rothschild & R.J. Lieber (Eds), Eagle Entangled:
US Foreign Policy in a Complex World (Longman, 1979).
64. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
(Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces
in the Making of History (Columbia University Press, 1987); and David Calleo, Beyond American
Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (Wheatsheaf, 1987).
65. See, for instance, Henry Kissinger, For the Record: Selected Statements, 1977–1980 (Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1981).
66. Quote from Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendour: The American Empire in Transition (Houghton
Mif in, 1987), p. 141.
67. For a guide to Carter’s global outlook, see John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Re-evaluation
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(Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 110–209.

68. A classic elaboration of the Carter world view can be found in Stanley Hoffmann, Primacy or World
Order: American Foreign Policy since the Cold War (McGraw Hill, 1978).
69. I explore the crisis of American power in the 1970s in my ‘From the Truman Doctrine to the Second
Superpower Detente: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27, No. 1
(1990), pp. 25–41, and ‘American power and the Soviet threat’, in: Anthony McGrew (Ed.), The United
States in the Twentieth Century: Empire (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994), pp. 19–66.
70. I discuss the Reagan strategy in my ‘Whatever Happened to the “Second” Cold War? Soviet–American
Relations, 1980–1988’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1990), pp. 155–72.
71. See my Beyond the Cold War: Superpower s at the Crossroads? (University Press of America, 1990).
72. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Allen Lane, 1976) and The Rise and Fall
of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (Allen & Unwin, 1980).
73. Interestingly, Kennedy seemed to agree with the traditional view that it was the over-extension of the
British Empire and the growing gap between British commitments overseas and its capacity to carry the
burden of Empire that lay at the heart of British decline, See his ‘ “Appeasement ” and British Defence
Policy in the Inter-war Years’, British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1976), pp.
195–215.
74. The Kennedy book was Ž rst published in hardback in 1988 by Random House in New York and Unwin
Hyman in London. The next year it was published in paperback by Fontana Press in London.
75. For the interest provoked by Kennedy’s book, see, for example, Michael Howard, ‘Imperial cycle: bucks,
bullets and bust’, The New York Times Review, 10 January 1988, and Peter Schmeisser, ‘Taking stock:
is America in decline?’, The New York Times Magazine, 17 April 1988. Paul Kennedy also helped to
popularise his own views in several fora. See inter alia ‘The (Relative) Decline of America’, The
Atlantic, August 1987, pp. 29–36.
76. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
77. The title of Walt Rostow’s attack was ‘Beware of Historians bearing False Historical Analogies’. It later
appeared in Foreign Affairs but was Ž rst published as Working Paper No. 88-03-2 by The IC2 Institute
of the University of Texas at Austin in February 1988. Rostow berated me for at least an hour on the
subject of Paul Kennedy in an interview I was trying to conduct with him (in Spring 1988) on his early
memories of the Marshall Plan!
78. See Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 19. In a communi -
cation with the author, the ‘generation hence’ turned out to be somewhere around 2010.
79. Paul Kennedy, ‘A guide to misinterpreters’, The New York Times, 4 November 1988.
80. Paul Kennedy, ‘Can the US remain number one?’, The New York Review of Books, 16 March 1989, pp.
36–42.
81. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi, ‘A crisis of hegemony ’, in: Samir Amin (Ed.), Dynamics of Global
Crisis (Monthly Review Press, 1982), pp. 55–108; Bruce Russett, ‘The Mysterious Case of Vanishing
Hegemony: Or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead?’, International Organization, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1985), pp.
206–31; Stephen Gill, ‘American Hegemony : Its Limits and Prospects in the Reagan Era’, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1985–6), pp. 311–36; and Susan Strange, ‘The Persistent
Myth of Lost Hegemony ’, International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1987), pp. 551–74.
82. ‘Her analysis may not be very  attering for Americans, but there can be no denying that she is
pro-American. She would like nothing better than to see the United States become the effective center

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of a transnational invisible empire.’ Quoted in Robert W. Cox, with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approache s to
World Order (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 186.
83. Susan Strange, ‘Cave! hic dragones: A Critique of Regime Analysis’, International Organization, Vol.
36, No. 2 (1982), p. 482.
84. A point made by Eric Helleiner in ‘Still an extraordinary power, but for how much longer? The United
States in world Ž nance’, in: Thomas C. Lawton, James S. Rosenau & Amy C. Verdun (Eds), Strange
Power: Shaping the Parameters of International Relations and International Political Economy (Ashgate,
2000), pp. 229–30.
85. For an early elaboration of her position, see Susan Strange, ‘Still an extraordinary power: America’s
power in a global monetary system’, in: Raymond E. Lombra & Willard E. Witts (Eds), Political
Economy of International and Domestic Monetary Relations (Iowa State University Press, 1982), pp.
73–103.
86. Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge University Press, 1990),
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esp. pp. 57–121.

87. For a short, succinct account of Gill’s position, see his ‘The Rise and Decline of Great Powers: The
American case’, Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1988), pp. 3–9.
88. Robert O. Keohane & Joseph P. Nye, Power and Interdependenc e (Little, Brown, 1977).
89. Joseph S Nye, Jr, Bound To Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books, 1990).
90. Jospeh S. Nye, Jr, ‘Flying a banner over the star-spangled States’, The Sunday Times (London) , 22 July
1990.
91. See the exchange of letters between Nye and Kennedy in The New York Review of Books, 11 October
1990.
92. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The US—Decline or Renewal?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 2 (1988–9), pp.
76–96.
93. Aaron L. Frieberg, ‘The Strategic Implications of Relative Economic Decline’, Political Science
Quarterly, Vol. 104, No. 3 (1989), pp. 401–31.
94. Francis Bator, ‘Must We Retrench?’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 2 (1989), pp. 93–123.
95. Richard N. Haass, ‘The Use (and Mainly Misuse) of History’, Orbis, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1988), pp. 411–9.
96. Another Republican, who had worked in the Reagan White House in the early 1980s, also authored an
attack on the declinists. See Henry Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline: Leading the World Economy
in the 1980s (Oxford University Press, 1990).
97. Kennedy, Preparing For The Twenty-First Century, p. 57.
98. David Calleo, The Bankrupting of America (Avon Books, 1992),
99. Michael D. Bernstein & David E. Adler, Understandin g American Economic Decline (Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
100. Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After
(The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 238–41.
101. Steven Schlosstein, The End of the American Century (Congdon & Weed, 1989).
102. See the debate between Edward N. Luttwak & Robery L. Bartley, ‘Is America on the Way Down?’,
Commentary, March 1992, pp. 15–27.
103. Donald W. White, The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power
(Yale University Press, 1996).
104. Cumings, ‘Still the American Century’.
105. Writing only a year before the implosion of the USSR, Nye could still argue that ‘it would be a mistake
to discount the Soviet Union as a great power in the twenty-Ž rst century’. Bound to Lead, p. 130.
106. The literature on unipolarity is immense. For a useful guide, see David Wilkinson, ‘Unipolarity without
Hegemony’ , International Studies Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999), pp. 144–72.
107. Figures taken from Congressiona l Quarterly Weekly, Vol. 58, No. 6 (2000), pp. 228–33.
108. Michael Mastanduno, ‘Models, Markets and Power: Political Economy and the Asia-PaciŽ c, 1989–1999’,
Review of International Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2000), pp. 493–508.
109. William Horsley, ‘Special Report: The Liberation of Japan’, Prospect, No. 63 (2001), pp. 52–6.
110. Figures from ‘Who’s Producing Now?’, The Economist, 22 February 1997, p. 87 and ‘A Survey of
Innovation in Industry’, The Economist, 20 February 1999, p. 27.
111. See Valur Ingimundarson , ‘The American dimension: Britain, Germany, and the reinforcement of US
hegemony in Europe in the 1990s’, in: Klaus Larres & Elizabeth Meehan (Eds), Uneasy Allies:
British–German Relations and European Integration since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.
165–83.

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112. Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making Of America’s Bosnia Policy (Brookings Institution Press,
2000).
113. The best account of US policy towards NATO remains James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When: The
U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
114. Figures from SIPRI Yearbook 1998 (Oxford University Press, 1998) and the Military Balance 1998–1999
(International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1999).
115. For a useful survey of US military power, see Gregg Easterbrook, ‘The Myth of the Hollow Military’,
The New Republic, No. 4469 (11 September 2000), pp. 22–7.
116. G. John Ikenberry, ‘Liberal hegemony and the future of the American postwar order’, in: T. V. Paul &
John Hall (Eds), International Order and the Future of Word Politics (Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 123.
117. Alfredo Valladao, The Twenty First Century Will Be American (Verso, 1996).
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118. John Gaddis gave a series of lectures to the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth in
December 2000 on precisely this theme.
119. Whether Robert Cox would agree with my conclusion about the present state of the world is by no means
certain. Cox at a number of points talked of ‘dominance without hegemony ’ and of ‘hegemony ’ only
being one form which dominance assumes; furthermore, that as a result of development s in the 1970s,
US hegemony in its original form gave way to dominance . See his Production Power and World Order:
Social Forces in the Making of World History (Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 7 and 299. Here
I am simply trying to employ what I interpret to be his use of the concept of hegemony in 1992 to
illustrate my thesis about the ‘new’ US hegemony. The quotes from Robert Cox in the main body of the
text are taken from Cox, with Sinclair, Approache s to World Order, pp. 137, 151. For a different use and
reading of Cox, see Anthony Payne, ‘Rethinking US–Caribbean Relations: Towards a New Mode of
Trans-territorial Governance ’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2000), esp. pp. 73–4.
120. See my ‘Rebels Without a Cause? Radical Theorists and the World System After the Cold War’, New
Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1998), pp. 445–60.
121. I discuss some of these questions in ‘New China: new Cold War?’, in: Ken Booth (ed.), Statecraft and
Security: The Cold War and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 224–46; ‘From the cold war
to strategic partnership? US–Russian relations since the end of the USSR’, in: Michael Bowker &
Cameron Ross (Eds), Russia after the Cold War (Longman, 2000), pp. 258–79; and ‘International history
since 1989’, in: John Baylis & Steve Smith (Eds), The Globalization of World Politics, 2nd edn. (Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 111–37.
122. Gerald Segal, ‘Still a Fragile Power’, New Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 3, (1998), pp. 442–4.
123. For an outstanding elaboration of this argument, see G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions,
Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order After Wars (Princeton University Press, 2000).
124. See David Campbell, ‘Contradictions of a lonely superpower’, in: David Slater & Peter J. Taylor (Eds),
The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power (Blackwell, 1999),
pp. 222–42.

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