ABSTRACT
It is a very potent belief that the United States is the most powerful political entity the modern world has ever seen. This claim is, of course, vulnerable to serious challenge – at the height of its influence, the British Empire probably far exceeded the current relative power of the United States, for example. Nevertheless, Washington has experienced real preeminence since the so-called “unipolar moment” when Soviet power dissolved, leaving the United States as the sole superpower. 1 Zakaria's thesis asserts that, as a result of this preeminence, the United States has recently been so powerful and the entire international system has been so profoundly influenced by American preferences that a serious challenge to US global hegemony would present us with a fundamentally different “post-American world.” I must say that I find this difficult to accept when viewed over a longer timespan. I really do not believe there has ever been a truly “American world” – surely a necessary precursor to a “post-American” one.
