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This chapter discusses American capitalism. Capitalism has not only become integrally related to the growth of the United States into a global industrial power, but in doing so has acquired an iconic property as the generic expression of American ideas and experience. Just as capitalism has played a role in giving definition to America's social identity and historical position, so the United States has emerged as the exemplar of capitalist organization and the defining reference point by which its merits and demerits as an economic and ethical system is adjudged.

As recent trends indicate, China's development into a global power is occurring in conjunction with the development of its neighboring countries. In many ways, its growth can benefit them by creating an East Asian economic cooperation system. China's growth will surely contribute to the development of and peace in East Asia and a new period of prosperity. This will be in stark contrast to the history of expansion and military conquest, wars, confrontation, and blood that marked the rise of Western powers and Japan in world history. Developing together with its neighbor states is one of China's fundamental strategies.

This chapter discusses how, throughout its first century, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association-Organization of American Historians contributed in major ways to the development of diplomatic history as a field of historical study. The opportunities the organization offered included the publication of articles in its journals, and the story the many articles have told is dominated by two big themes: the development of a continental empire and the rise of a global power, two of the major features of American history.

Debates and research on the experience of world powers such as Britain or the United States have focused on two questions: why in the modern world do some states acquire a position of global prominence while others fall behind? And why is it that those powers that have risen so successfully also tend to relinquish their position? This chapter demonstrates how these two questions can be answered parsimoniously within the framework of the theory of long cycles of global politics. It proposes an evolutionary, mechanism/process model of global politics that rests upon the following core propositions: evolution, including social evolution, is a pattern of the universe; evolutionary processes necessarily occur in favorable conditions; evolutionary processes activate the mechanisms of variation, cooperation, selection, and reinforcement; and evolutionary processes co-evolve with other evolutionary processes.

The basic premises of much of the realist-inspired literature that predicts an inevitable conflict between the United State and China is based on assessments of relative power capabilities. This chapter argues that China’s comprehensive power remains a very long way behind that of the United States, when it is measured in terms of both capabilities and influence. As a result, the prospects of a global clash between these two powers appears remote. However, the power gap is much narrower in the regional Asia-Pacific context—and hence the possibility of a Sino-American conflict erupting there (and possibly becoming global)—is not insignificant.

This chapter studies the age of global power in the United States. It states that for the past five years, the United States has been the most powerful country in the world. One problem for historians is that they need to know not only how to think about the United States without restoring its own centered sense of itself, but also how to do this without discarding the success it has achieved in centralizing power in the world. One section mentions the awareness diplomatic historians have of the irony of writing about U.S. engagement with other nations, while another section is concerned with the work of John Lewis Gaddis. The chapter also discusses the impact armed U.S. intervention has on the world.

This chapter first considers the internal contradiction in the system of international law which is exemplified in the politics of global powers. It then focuses on global powers—their politics, sense of exceptionalism, and their belief in the supremacy of national sovereignty. It also analyzes some of the policies of the present era's major global power, the United States, insofar as they are related to issues or events that had far-reaching implications for world order.

This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which Americans re-examined racial conflicts in light of a newly perceived global mission of overseas commercial, military, and cultural expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines cultural debates surrounding the relationship between whiteness and empire, highlighting the literary responses of four multiethnic U.S. writers: Frank R. Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald. These writers used literary forms to complicate the popular association of whiteness with national mission or global progress. In their writings, nonwhite soldiers, scientists, explorers, and diplomats travel abroad, altering the racial scripts of empire by revealing the U.S. national mission for global power and leadership to be, instead of white, potentially multiracial. And yet they also detach race from empire by challenging whiteness itself as a social, scientific, and legal category—a strategy referred to as “shadowing the white man's burden.”

This concluding chapter evaluates the implications that emerge from this book's theoretical and historical analysis for American foreign policy. The United States begins a new century as an unrivaled global power. American foreign policy makers need to be reminded what characteristics of the postwar order have made American power reasonably acceptable to other states and peoples during and after the Cold War. American power is not only unprecedented in its preponderance, but it is also unprecedented in the way it is manifest within and through institutions. This helps explain why it has been so durable. If American policy makers want to perpetuate America's preeminent position, they will need to continue to find ways to operate within international institutions, and by so doing restrain that power and make it acceptable to other states.

Chapter 1 discusses the European Union’s (EU’s) emergence as a global regulatory power. It introduces key EU institutions and describes their role in the regulatory process. It then explains how regulation has become a key tool to advance European integration, giving these institutions a powerful motivation to pursue an ambitious regulatory agenda. It also argues how the creation of the single market was always the primary concern for the EU institutions. For a long time, the Brussels Effect was an ancillary and largely unintended by-product of a regulatory agenda that was driven by internal motivations. Only more recently, a conscious external agenda has emerged alongside this internal agenda.

This chapter examines China's rapid rise in the global wind power industry, despite the fact that the nation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the world's single largest source of emissions. It briefly looks into how China is now succeeding at green innovation rather than just replicating technologies from elsewhere and manufacturing them inexpensively. China's emergence as a green energy leader comes at a time when energy is the topmost concern of most national security agendas, and when climate change is being linked to extreme weather events and disasters. Given global concern about the impact of China's rapidly increasing energy needs on global supplies and its ability almost singlehandedly to change the global climate system, it is worthwhile to understand how and why Beijing has embraced green innovation, which could play a crucial role in the global transition to a low-carbon economy.

This chapter investigates the decisions on ground troop deployments, culminating in the final decision for a major ground troop deployment in mid-1965. It also reviews the effect of the global imbalance of power, and that of the Byzantine domestic politics of blame for any future defeat in South Vietnam. The incentive for systematic bombing of the North was underlined by a new intelligence estimate in October that reemphasized the importance of U.S. military dominance over North Vietnam and China. Johnson's rejection of even the threat of massive devastation to try to put pressure on the North Vietnamese made the bombing policy very different from what had been envisioned by the national security bureaucracy. Johnson's final effort to avert an open-ended general war in Vietnam concluded with political theater. Robert McNamara abandoned the limited commitment option just as Johnson was trying to make it official policy.

This chapter first identifies a number of political-economic developments shaping the crisis in area studies, with particular reference to Asia Pacific studies. It then considers alternative ways of reimagining regional geographies and issues. It notes the significance of the end of the Cold War for the modernization discourse and spatial categories that emerged in the post-World War II period. Coupled with the rise of new centers of global power, this has destabilized some fundamental aspects of the area studies project and given rise to a number of alternative ways of claiming knowledge about Asia and the Pacific. The chapter discusses the distinctive characteristics of these overlapping trends: civilization studies, oceanic studies, the “Asianization of Asian studies,” diasporic studies, and indigenous studies. It concludes that no single approach is likely to meet all the needs of more appropriate forms of area studies while avoiding complicity with the neoliberal ideology of globalization.