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This chapter investigates global trends from 1991 to 2008. In particular, it inquires whether the macro-level propositions identified in Chapter 1 have been borne out. Therefore, it considers whether the level of interstate conflict has declined, whether global defense spending has decreased, whether the threat of global terrorism has begun to supplant interstate warfare on the global security agenda, and whether regional and global multilateral security institutions have begun to supplant states as the primary security providers, as many globalization scholars have predicted. It is shown that global trends are not very consistent with the globalization-kills-the-national-security-state hypothesis. Moreover, to the extent that certain features of the contemporary international system are consistent with the globalization school's predictions, it remains unclear whether globalization is the sole cause (or even the primary cause), or whether something potentially less enduring — such as American hegemony, the defense/deterrence dominance of contemporary military technology, or a lull after the all-encompassing global clash that was the Cold War — may have been more instrumental.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some thoughts about Franco-American relations. It also discusses the reasons why the French were more eager to confront America than other Europeans. First, more than other Europeans, the French aspired to, and had the means to exercise, international leadership. If they conceded that they lagged behind the hyperpower, they were still persuaded that they were an elite nation with the power, both hard and soft, as well as the experience and self-confidence, to merit a commanding position in Europe and beyond. More keenly than others the French also distrusted American hegemony, found it unreliable and self-serving, and linked the United States with the invasive process of globalization. Second, American practices and values targeted signifiers of identity more closely in France than they did those of its neighbors.

The concluding chapter begins by offering a succinct summary of the book’s overall arguments and elaborates how they contribute to the fields of international relations, Asian Studies, and social science more broadly. It then discusses the relevance of the book’s arguments for ongoing policy debates regarding the future of American hegemony with the rise of China. From a meta-theoretical point of view, I end the book with a caveat that one cannot predict the future with certainty.

Nearly every recent National Security Strategy of the United States takes for granted that the United States is a hegemonic power, that it constructed a liberal international order after World War II, and that it expanded that order from the 1990s onward. This chapter looks closely at these assumptions. What is international liberalism? What is hegemony? What is international order? How does world history look through the lens of theories of hegemony and hegemonic ordering? We argue that international orders have architectures—norms, rules, and principles—and infrastructures—the interactions, practices, and relationships that undergird them. Overall, international order resembles a dynamic ecosystem, one that structures the behavior of the states and other actors that constitute it. This helps explain not only why post–Cold War liberal enlargement faltered but also how it created conditions for its own unraveling.

This chapter examines the revolution in Mexico in 1910. This revolution began as a call for a more participatory government and agrarian reform, but it quickly deepened into a broad-based cultural, political, and nationalist rejection of the political elites in the nation's capital, the great estate owners, and the foreign capitalists—for the most part, Americans. The Mexican Revolution presented the first major political challenge to American hegemony in Latin America during the modern era and the sense of anti-Americanism intensified as the fighting among the Mexicans deepened and broadened. This chapters also discusses the rise of the orozquistas, the fate of settlers and colonists, and Venustiano Carranza's revolution.

This concluding chapter explains that American-style postwar “Fordism” was only one pattern in the mottled global legacy left behind by Henry Ford. It was not the least ideological effect of American hegemony that in the 1960s modernization theory could universalize this unique historical arrangement — what can be called “high mass-consumption” — as the target of successful development itself. Responding to the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists added a next phase: “Post-Fordism” or “post-industrial society” signaled deindustrialization to some and the promise of a “service and information economy” to others. What united these constructs was a thinking in sequential stages, a preoccupation with national patterns of development, and a theory of causation centered on self-generating forces. It has become clear that cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization are inseparable from concerted efforts to restructure the global division of labor, that productive dual-use technologies are fiercely contested by states and corporations alike, that investment and disinvestment cannot be dislodged from contests over the terms of globalization, and that capital has no autonomous power outside of the designs and struggles of political actors.

This chapter examines the transformation of world politics in the first two post-Cold War decades, as forces of globalization altered the security, political, economic, and normative contexts in which sovereign states operate. The most profound structural changes over these twenty years included the rise and decline of America’s “unipolar moment”, a dramatic shift of power to the developing world, the declining incidence of war (both intra- and interstate), the growing strategic salience of transnational threats, the emergence of failed states as a major security concern, the growing global influence of regional organizations, and a sharpening debate over norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. To cope with this daunting global agenda, states increasingly turned not only to formal treaty-based international organizations but to more flexible arrangements of collective action.

Donald Trump and Trumpism are less the cause of the current crisis in the American system than a symptom and accelerant of underlying trends. This chapter examines the continuities and differences between Trump foreign policy and that of his predecessors. It demonstrates that Trump is, in fact, unusual in the scope and scale of his dismissal of multilateralism, ability to raise doubts about American alliance commitments, and rejection of liberal internationalism. These policies magnify the longer-term tendency of the United States to adopt policies that undermine its geopolitical position, such as fiscally irresponsible tax cuts, underinvestment in domestic infrastructure and human capital, democratic backsliding, and overreliance on military instruments. In short, even if Trump had never been elected the United States would still face the erosion of its leadership from inevitable shifts in relative power, and still be failing to pursue domestic policies that might mitigate those shifts.

This chapter provides an overview of the Americanization movement and its efforts to transform the Japanese into patriotic American citizens. It examines this maintenance of American hegemony in Hawai‘i through a dialectic of force and consent visible in family portraits of Japanese settlers taken by Usaku Teragawachi in the 1920s and 1930s. Analyzing the broader meaning of these photographs as they became a part of Japanese settler discourse represented in the 1985 publication Kanyaku Imin: A Hundred Years of Japanese Life in Hawai‘i, the chapter challenges that master narrative of American immigration by situating the “successes” of the Japanese settler community within a colonial system.

For most of its history, China was at the center of an East Asian interstate system, the Chinese tianxia. The Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, even means "central state" (or "middle kingdom"). By contrast, the modern interstate system is usually understood as an anarchic system of competing states. In reality, the 21^st century interstate system is a central state system like the Ming Dynasty Chinese tianxia, but centered on the United States, not on China. The American-centered system began to form much earlier than is usually understood, and was clearly described by many intellectuals in the aftermath of World War One. It is now in its prime, not its decline. Like the historical Chinese tianxia, the current American Tianxia is strongly hierarchical, but unlike the Chinese tianxia, it is not relational. This calls into question the key conceit of Westphalian sovereignty, the sovereign equality of states. But it is also responsible for the relatively peaceful conduct of international relations under the American Tianxia.

The rise of the Islamist movement, a phenomenon that Islamists call the Awakening, has attracted the attention of academics of various disciplines and of diverse opinions and outlooks. They have taken many different approaches and have come up with contradictory results. Interpreting the phenomenon has sometimes been mistaken for trying to justify it. Since it would be difficult to give an exhaustive account here of the broad outlines of the research that has been done, it must suffice to indicate the main trends and attitudes. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the following three chapters in this volume, which deal with the approach of the state's official religious establishment; the approach that treats the Islamist phenomenon as the cultural manifestation of a new reality that rejects subservience and Euro-American hegemony; and presenting problematic aspects of reading the religious texts themselves.

Antonio Giustozzi’s chapter charts out the reactionary policies of Gulf monarchies to the evolving regional politics in Afghanistan and to changing perceptions of American hegemony post 2003. It traces the post-9/11 funding of the Afghan Taliban sourcing from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The competition between Iran and these Sunni funders in buying hegemony in the region is explored as also the competitive dynamics amongst the Sunni funders themselves, particularly the Saudis and Qataris. The role of Pakistan in lobbying for the involvement of the Gulf powers in nurturing the Afghan Taliban while simultaneously pursuing the ‘peace process’ is equally scrutinized. Finally, the complications caused by Pakistan’s conciliatory approach towards the Iranian presence along with the Taliban and a subsequent fallout between the Gulf and Pakistani agendas are explained.

Karl Polanyi’s call, in The Great Transformation, for a re-embedding of markets, is widely understood to have come to fruition in the American New Deal and in the post-war order of ‘embedded liberalism’. Based on archival sources, this chapter shows that Polanyi’s political project was far more radical. Polanyi initially considered the New Deal a vital response to the problems of American capitalism, but one that would have little relevance to the problems and dynamics of European societies. There, he considered a socialist transformation both possible and necessary. But eventually, Polanyi realised that the US, far from remaining an exceptional outlier of ‘nineteenth-century civilisation’, was imposing its model on Britain and Europe. The internationalisation of the American New Deal in the Bretton Woods order marked the defeat of Polanyi’s political project.

This sixth scenario is marked by high energy prices, weak growth, and global harmony. The United States and the European Union have only weak recoveries from the travails of 2008-2013, and China is unable to transition to a sustainable high growth path. Energy production of fossil fuels runs into geological and political barriers, and energy prices rise despite weak economic growth. There is a consensus, at least among OECD countries, that the fossil-fuel driven global economy is environmentally unsustainable. Stringent new environmental regulations and huge new taxpayer-supplied funds spur new research, innovation, and a large-scale switch away from coal and oil. There is a significant decrease in carbon emissions helped along by new international agreements on efficiency standards and technology adaptation, as well as prolonged slow growth. Countries that wish to catch up to the OECD have no choice but to adapt to this new eco world given high energy prices and weak overall growth. In the case of China, civic activism and a stolid leadership result in the demise of the Communist Party rule. Aside from environmental cooperation, states are focused inward, dealing with disruptive citizens unhappy with slow growth. America remains the sole superpower.