The concept of American hegemony has always been a topic of interest of mine. More specifically, I have always been interested in how hegemons initially gain power to usurp previous hegemons, and how they (attempt to) maintain power as resentful rival states compete for the hegemonic throne. In Robert O. Keohane’s Hegemony and After: What Can Be Said About the Future of American Global Leadership, Keohane explores the scholarly discourse on hegemony, weighing arguments from declinists such as Robert Kagan and Robert J. Lieber with his own counterarguments, routinely highlighting the flaws and holes in their fallacious arguments.

Firstly and most importantly, Keohane outlines the importance of hegemony in an anarchic world, and explains that Declinism is an American foreign policy view that has re-emerged in policy circles with the rising threat of China in relation to America’s relative decline. This perspective is connected to a book that I recently read by economic historian Niall Ferguson called The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. He too, being a neorealist declinist, argues that the West is stagnating due to poor democratic, economic, legal and civil institutions, and points at globalization as the culprit of its descent. Furthermore, Keohane sheds light on the evidence supporting Hegemonic Stability Theory, and connects the scholarly discourse back to their roots with specific mention of E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz, all IR scholars who we discussed about in class. He reserves a healthy level of idealism while maintaining a neorealist perspective, pointing out that International Organizations such at the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, while having been at the core of improving the lives of many vulnerable peoples around the world, have also been used to institutionalize American hegemonic power into the international order (or lack thereof) and that hegemony is costly and may not be sustainable, but argues that there is hope for the world to improve. He also clarifies that the lack of a central government coupled with a lack of trust between states results in the security dilemma, and argues that hegemony is essential for cooperation between states. Furthermore, he points out that the health of a state’s hegemony is dependent on if they often or rarely partake in wars; hegemonies can be maintained by keeping military budgets high, but are more difficult to maintain if American voters are more focused on welfare benefits and tax cuts instead of funding wars, explaining why the US has resisted the hegemonic throne for so long given its long history of isolationism. Before concluding, Keohane highlights a series of questions regarding the future of hegemony that are heavily debated by IR scholars today, and argues that while we cannot be certain of any argument’s validity today, IR scholars should think more like scientists who value systematic evidence and who are aware of their fallibility, harking back to the Positivist view of International Relations as a discipline.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to find out that Keohane does not outline (in this essay) what he believes to be the cause of hegemonic Declinism in the US. Surprisingly, he focuses so much of his efforts trying to point out the flaws in pessimistic arguments that he fails to explicitly mention the idealist exaggerations concerning hegemony and its impact on the world. Moreover, he mentions that powerful states encounter unsolvable problems, but does not elaborate on this important point any further in the essay. Similarly, he mentions but does not elaborate on the concepts of “hard” and “soft” power respectively, a concept that I find to be quite connected to hegemony having learned about it in one of my International Relations History courses. Finally, Keohane frequently brings up the rising number of democracies in the world as a consequence of American hegemony, but neglects to mention that while they may call themselves democracies, in reality they are more like polyarchies rather than true democracies, including the US.

Ultimately, I found the Keohane reading to be quite informative, resulting in me asking for a more in-depth analysis on the dimensions of hegemony as an International phenomenon by the end of the essay.