ABSTRACT
This chapter provides readers with a brief notion of how the dynamics of international politics have been evolving for some time and how these challenge the understanding of the issue of leadership in global politics. The United States, along with its Western European, North Atlantic, and East Asian allies, shaped the rules of international politics and played a key role in how the issues of wealth, security, development, justice, and human rights would be defined. The end of the Cold War era and the degrading of communism as a rival ideology in the early 1990s led the Western powers to believe that the road to Western primacy enshrining Western values and norms was now fully opened. The speeding up of the globalization process over the last three decades has also added up to the salience of liberal thinking in international relations as various forms of global interconnectedness have eroded the theoretical power of realism.
