The National Interest, September 26, 2016

The real question about America’s role in the world today, as I have argued in The End of American World Order, is not whether America itself is declining, but whether the international order it built and dominated thus far, which some call the liberal international order or the American world order, will be enduring. The two issues are often conflated but, in fact, are different. Whether America is declining is debatable; the fate of the American world order is less so. As Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former foreign minister, recently wrote: “Looking back 26 years, we should admit that the disintegration of the Soviet Union — and with it, the end of the Cold War — was not the end of history, but rather the beginning of the Western liberal order’s denouement.”

Where does that leave the issue of American primacy? It depends on how one defines the term. Joseph Nye, one of the principal defenders of American primacy today, carefully distinguishes primacy from hegemony and defines the former as “a country’s disproportionate (and measurable) share of all three kinds of power resources: military, economic, and soft.” On that basis, he concludes that the United States will retain its primacy at least until the first half of the present century.

Read More at: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/american-primacy-multiplex-world-17841