When did the American Empire begin

[LSLGuy]

@Babale

If the US was not a hegemon, is the idea that we’d have a bunch of free and prosperous countries happily singing hand in hand around the whole world?

Or would some other Great Power, or collection of Great Powers, be out there forming its own hegemony?

The dynamics of international power politics is always hierarchical. There is never a power vacuum.

As one example, consider Iran’s efforts to become a local hegemon in the Middle East. At which they will succeed if not stopped by a greater force than Iran can successfully counter. Be that a coalition, or a single actor.

If the US suddenly and utterly turned its back on the world NK-style, everybody would be scrambling to level-up into whatever gaps wherever the departure of US power created. The countries with the greatest reach would find the greatest opportunities.

On the “good guy’s” side that would be the EU & UK mostly, with perhaps Australia & Canada within their regions. On the “bad guy’s” side that’d be China first and foremost. Russia would have the desire, but not nearly the means they’d have had absent their Ukrainian misadventure.

But I’d expect the near-term (10-40 years) we’d see a lot of local hegemons a la Iran, and rather less of the 1-4 Great Powers dividing up the planet. Much less the fabled “uni-polar world” of post-Soviet US primacy so widely predicted by the pundits as the Soviet Union came crashing down.

[Chingon]

Then make your point without relying on exaggeration or setting up false dichotomies.

[Babale]

@Chingon

Then make your point without relying on exaggeration or setting up false dichotomies

I did, here is my point again in case you missed it:

@Babale

First, can you actually make the case that a non-polar world is inherently better than either a multipolar world with a handful of great powers or a unipolar world, led by the US or by someone else?

Second, can a non-polar world actually exist? If it cannot, which multipolar or unipolar combination of superpowers do you propose would do better than the US?

[Chingon]

That’s good!

At least now you aren’t imposing the ridiculous dichotomy below.

@Babale

If the US was not a hegemon, is the idea that we’d have a bunch of free and prosperous countries happily singing hand in hand around the whole world?

My main issue was the fallacy you inserted in your argument, where you tried to paint anyone who was against a hegemon as naive idiots by using the Nirvana fallacy.

[Der_Trihs]

@Babale

Second, can a non-polar world actually exist?

I think it can; it’s just an unstable condition. At least some nations are going to want to gain advantages over others, some will by more successful than others, and the result of that is going to be a “polarized” world. A non-polar world would almost certainly be the result of a previous polarized world order collapsing, and a strictly temporary situation.

[LSLGuy]

Agreed.

In a world where all countries were about the same geographic size, about the same population and degree of development / GDP per capita, and nobody happened to have a (near-) monopoly on some strategic raw material, the whole world could (not would) look a lot like the current EU. As long as no one country elected an asshat e.g. Hungary and Orbán.

In a world where places like e.g. Nepal are adjacent to places like e.g. China, polarity will promptly form or re-form after any cataclysm that doesn’t destroy modern civilization.