ABSTRACT
COSTS AND BENEFITS OF REGIME MAINTENANCE
According to the hegemonic-stability thesis, the maintenance of a liberal trading regime imposes costs as well as accords benefits to the hegemonic leader. Drawing upon the historical decline of pax britannica as well as the more recent decline of pax americana, many analysts have assumed and argued that the long-term costs associated with leadership outweigh the potential benefits. Indicative of this viewpoint, Andrew Mack argued that, ‘neo-Marxist claims to the contrary, America’s globalist policies were never self-financing-let alone profitable’.1 The Nixon Doctrine of 1971, therefore, he stated, was a response to the unbearable costs of hegemonic control, an attempt to achieve ‘hegemony on the cheap’ that was, however, laden with contradictions because, ‘It was illusory to believe that America’s allies would be prepared to bear an increasingly larger share of the costs of pax americana while allowing the US to continue to play its traditional role unchallenged’.2
