ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the later 1990s, journalistic and academic commentary on the United States has been preoccupied with the nature and sheer extent of American international power. The United States has been variously described as the global hegemon, the lone superpower, the indispensable nation, the hyperpower and the Überpower.1 By the close of the twentieth century, American global pre-eminence, rooted in the triad of military, economic and political/cultural ‘soft power’, was widely recognized as having assumed extraordinary proportions, to a degree arguably unparalleled in human history. In turn, a major academic industry developed to explain, denounce and unravel the story of America’s rise.
