ABSTRACT
The voluminous literature on American power naturally focuses on the United States as agent, that is, the international order’s subject, whose material and material assets are assessed in order to explain its capacity to affect the shape of events almost everywhere outside its borders. Discussions of the United States’ recent global position generally start with its massive concrete assets understood in terms of such attributes as the wealth and vitality of its population, the size and dynamism of its domestic economy, the competitiveness and overseas reach of its corporations, the war- and peace-making capacity of its military. Beyond these indicators of its hard power, the United States’ clout has also been attributed to the attractiveness of its liberal values, the success of its economic model, and the popularity of its mass cultural products. Such examples of soft power shift more attention to the willingness of other states as objects in the international system to bend to Uncle Sam’s will. Although US influence is generally understood to be mainly a function of its own hard- and soft-power assets, this chapter makes a further claim: an epistemology which does not also understand American power as a dependent variable is insufficient in an interdependent world.
