When Will the Unipolar World End?

Peter Harris

Security, Eurasia

Hegemony is premised on dominance in Asia and Europe.

The American Century is fading. At least, that is the consensus among most analysts of international politics. Whether they attribute U.S. decline to domestic dysfunction or to the rise of China and other emerging powers, observers tend to agree that, sooner or later, the “unipolar moment” will give way to an international system populated by more than one superpower.

Even so, it is unclear how we will know when the unipolar world has finally slipped away. What will it take for another global power to equal or surpass the United States? What is the threshold for declaring unipolarity a thing of the past? Most attempts to answer these questions involve fine-tuning existing measures of aggregate national power. From this view, understanding U.S. decline is a question of predicting the moment at which a peer competitor might outstrip America in aggregate material (economic and military) terms.

But the unipolar world is not just a function of relative military budgets. It is also defined by a geographic distribution of power and influence. The two go hand in hand. Military and economic might allows the United States to sustain major overseas commitments, but it is not material power in the abstract that defines the United States as hegemonic. It is the overseas deployment of America’s military and political power that matters more than anything else.