The construction of a multipolar world...obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet... it is... criminal by its very nature... drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance... ~ Samir Amin

The unwavering conviction that Our America is one, from the Río Bravo to Patagonia, is imperative, and that we have a fundamental duty to prevent them from plundering our natural resources and subjugating us to their hegemony. The hostility of imperialism is today directed against our most genuine values. ~Miguel Díaz-Canel (President of Cuba)

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. ~Fareed Zakar

Hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others (especially of countries) with the most powerful controlling the others. The dominant state is known as the hegemon.

Quotes

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• The construction of a multipolar world...obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet. In my eyes it is an overweening project, criminal by its very nature, which is drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance, not only in the countries of the South but also, to a seemingly lesser degree, in those of the North.
  • Samir Amin in Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, World Book Publishing (2006)

• The hegemonist strategy of the United States, which operates within the framework of the new collective imperialism, seeks nothing less than to establish Washington’s military control over the entire planet. This is the means to ensure privileged access to all of the world’s natural resources, and to compel subaltern allies, Russia, China and the whole third world to swallow their status as vassals. Military control of the planet is the means to impose, as a last resort, the draining of ‘tribute’ through political violence – as a substitute for the ‘spontaneous’ flow of capital that offsets the American deficit, the Achilles heel of US hegemony.
  • Samir Amin in Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, World Book Publishing (2006)

• The creation of a front against hegemonism is the number one priority today, as the creation of an anti-Nazi alliance was the number one priority yesterday. No European project can make any progress unless the strategy of the United States is put to flight.
  • Samir Amin in Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, World Book Publishing (2006)

• In order to protect its position as a valuable trade and security partner, the United States should find ways to reassure Asian countries that it continues to be invested in the security, stability, and prosperity of the region. Such reassurances must include a demonstrated willingness to respect and accommodate its partners, old and new. Even after hegemony, a global order, based on multilateral cooperation, can yield shared benefits for all its members, including the United States.
  • Bidisha Biswas and Anish Goel in What Comes After US Hegemony?, The Diplomat (19 December 2018)

• Trump... though representing the most reactionary US government in recent memory, paradoxically has also led to an opening to challenge US power. The first reason is that he and his administration are much less disciplined about obscuring their true intentions behind insincere proclamations of benevolent motives. Whereas the George W. Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq War successfully manufactured consent amongst a large swath of the US public by scaring them over false claims about “weapons of mass destruction,” the Trump administration doesn’t even hide the fact that its foreign policy is motivated by advancing the US economic interests.
  • CounterPunch, The Failed Venezuelan Coup and the Decline of US Hegemony, Peter Bolton, (27 June 2019)

• As the rise of other fascistic governments around the world – from Brazil to Eastern Europe – demonstrates, the neoliberal and imperialist status quo is morphing into a new fascistic stage of its evolution. The failure of traditional progressive parties to provide an alternative has opened a gaping political space that reactionary populists have been more than happy to fill. And their rise will only embolden Washington to continue cavorting around the globe, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. As the second decades of the new millennium nears completion we are beginning to truly understand what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said: Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.
  • CounterPunch, Failed Venezuelan Coup and the Decline of US Hegemony, Peter Bolton, (27 June 2019)

• In September 2002 the [G.W.] Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the United States and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9-11 atrocities and was planning others. The campaign, timed to the onset of the midterm congressional elections, was highly successful in shifting attitudes. It soon drove American public opinion off the global spectrum and helped the administration achieve electoral aims and establish Iraq as a proper test case for the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will.
  • Noam Chomsky in Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003) Full text online

• The Guardian’s coverage of Latin America, especially of populist leftwing governments that have rebelled against traditional and oppressive US hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for leftwing figures like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but official enemies of the US, rather than the region’s rightwing authoritarians beloved of Washington....The Guardian also...[has taken a] prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and NATO hegemony while demonizing Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such as Syria.
  • Jonathan Cook in Guardian Escalates Its Vilification of Julian Assange, Antiwar.com, Randolph Bourne Institute (1 December 2018)

• The unwavering conviction that Our America is one, from the Río Bravo to Patagonia, is imperative, and that we have a fundamental duty to prevent them from plundering our natural resources and subjugating us to their hegemony. The hostility of imperialism is today directed against our most genuine values. They are bothered by the solidarity that characterizes us; they do not tolerate social justice, and even less equity in the distribution of income.
  • Speech by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, delivered during Inauguration of the 16th ALBA-TCP Summit in Havana, Granma (17 December 2018)

• Accusing tech giants like Facebook and Google of “working hand in glove” with the US government and conservative think tanks, Martin said the attack on alternative media outlets that challenge the “corporate media hegemony” of the US was an attempt at “literally curating our reality and trying to paint anything that challenges this establishment narrative as conspiracy theories, as disinformation, as Russian trolls.”
  • Abby Martin quoted in Curating our reality: Investigative journalist Abby Martin takes aim at US media hegemony, RT.com (5 September 2018)

• If the world experiences a slow, relatively peaceful transition away from U.S. hegemony, then the subsequent global order just might maintain some of the liberal international institutions that still represent the best of American values. If, by contrast, the golden-shower diplomacy of Donald Trump continues... then we will likely witness a harsher world order based on autocracy, Realpolitik, and commercial domination, with scant attention to human rights, women’s rights, or the rule of law.
  • Alfred McCoy in American Global Power Is Fading – And Here’s How That Could Change the World, TomDispatch, (22 May 2018)

• Russia practices a remarkable two-prong approach in its foreign policy that combines a responsible non-hegemonic military strength with careful maintenance of balance of forces in particularly conflictive areas. This is precisely what is needed in Latin America in order to preserve peace, as opposed to the divide-and-rule approach used by U.S. foreign policy. More broadly, Russia and Venezuela share a common view of a multipolar world cooperating in social, military and economic areas of interest that replaces the hegemonic unipolar strangling financial world dominated by the U.S.
  • Nino Pagliccia in Have the Russian Military Aircrafts in Venezuela Breached the Door to 'America’s Backyard'? Venezuela Analysis, (19 December 2018)

• In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.
  • Leon Trotsky (1928), quoted by A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016, by David North, World Socialist Web Site (11 July 2016)

• Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since... As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.
  • Fareed Zakaria in The Self-Destruction of American Power Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment (July/August 2019)

• U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet.
  • Fareed Zakaria in The Self-Destruction of American Power Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2019)

See also

External links