It is often heard in public debate that US power is in decline, meaning that its economic and technological primacy is eroding, that it can no longer project its power at will and that it is losing its role as the international rule-setter. Supporters of this thesis claim that we are moving from a US-centered world order to a multipolar one where the United States will no longer be the global hegemon, and according to them this is happening because of the rise of new powers like China, Russia, India, and others.

While this is true to a certain extent, a fundamental aspect is often ignored: Washington’s own role in unraveling the international order it helped to create.

Background

The forces driving the rise and decline of great powers is the subject of intense debate among scholars worldwide. One of the most recurrent theories (but not the only one) is the power transition theory. It postulates that, at some point, a challenging power emerges to defy the hegemon’s supremacy and that this results in a conflict which determines whether the latter will retain or lose its primacy.

This theory has been applied to explain the rise and fall of various powers and the wars they fought with their competitors from Spain to Great Britain and eventually the United States. Great Britain dominated through much of the 18th and 19th centuries, but in the meanwhile America was accumulating enough power to substitute Britain in terms of economic prowess and naval supremacy. In this case, the power transition occurred without a direct military clash between the hegemon and the challenger: Britain simply lost its primacy due to the economic competition of other powers and because two world wars drained its resources to the point that its immense overseas empire collapsed. The United States, for its part, emerged victorious from two world wars, and in 1945 it was the main architect of a liberal world order based on international norms and organizations, the rule of law, democracy, and free market policies. But the Soviet Union had also risen to superpower status after emerging victorious in WWII, and it supported a very different political and economic model. The US and the USSR subsequently engaged in a fierce global-scale confrontation known as the Cold War, which ended 45 years later with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and triumph for the United States. It was then believed that the world would enter in a phase of long-term peace centered on the US, often dubbed as Pax Americana.

But this proved to be just an illusion. Apart from the emergence of transnational threats such as terrorism, new powers are now rising to challenge America’ supremacy. First and foremost China, which seems poised to bypass the United States as the world’s largest economy and is correspondingly expandings its military capabilities and footprint. Russia, in spite of its various structural weaknesses, remains a powerful competitor that has partially recovered the influence it lost after the fall of the USSR. Other powers like India and Brazil are also getting stronger in relative terms.