Dark Power: Globalization, Inequality, And Conflict‪.‬

The question of whether another state would rise to challenge US hegemony became relevant in the 1990s after the implosion of the Soviet Union left the United States with seemingly unprecedented might. It became even more pressing after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, as the second Bush administration aspired to a military preponderance that could not be matched by any combination of competitors. "Realist" theorists and commentators intoned that in a world of sovereign nation-states, such an asymmetry would necessarily be intolerable to all non-hegemonic states. As a result, a search for a new equilibrium would emerge, either spontaneously as middle sized countries acted collectively to contain the new gorilla on the block, or by dint of painful institutional learning and construction by far-sighted statesmen. Although it is still unclear which, if either, of these outcomes will emerge, the balance of power mantra continues to be the dominant framework for understanding global dynamics: it is the ideology of foreign policy as scripted, in effect, by Clint Eastwood. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]