Late-night musings

10 August 2007, 0404 EDT

Will we look back on all those arguments about how unipolarity is stable, American primacy is secure, and traditional balance-of-power politics don’t work in hegemonic systems as quaint artifacts of the late 1990s?

Will we conclude that US primacy died in the sands of Mesopotamia, or that secular economic and technological trends ended hyperpower?

Or will we see, in retrospect, that Russian assertiveness, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Sino-US balance of financial terror, European defense plans, and all that jazz, were merely noise?

Image source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/getaways/destinations/Rome/images/rome_forum.jpg

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.