ABSTRACT
Today, in capitalism’s rebirth under the process of globalization “. . . that task has fallen upon the United States. The striking feature of the US response is a decisive shift from seeking order through consensus between nation-states to imposing order through coercion upon states” (Jha 2006, 174). This process has gone on since the 1970s because the leaders of the US primacy coalition have effectively alienated both allies and adversaries throughout the state system, coupled with the fact that “[a] hegemonic world order exists when
the major members of an international system agree on a code of norms, rules and law which helps govern the behavior of all” (Knutsen 1999, 49; Paupp 2009). The Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 changed all of that. As a result of the series of US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with an illegal occupation of these nations, the lack of an official sanction for these actions by the UN Security Council as a guarantor of global order under the terms of the UN Charter, we find that American hegemony was now opposed by social movements, states, and regions who saw the global future in terms of a world without US hegemony (Paupp 2007, 2009). A global trend has been progressing since 2003 wherein a global counterhegemonic alliance against US hegemony has been spreading between states and social movements throughout Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Further, it is evident that US hegemonic decline has been spurred by its own imperial overreach in terms of wars and over 730 military bases around the world coupled with a severe financial collapse in 2008 from which it has yet to recover. Now, lacking consensus, suffering from imperial overreach, and trapped in a lingering financial recession, we find that the “crumbling walls” of US hegemony are exposing the reality of a multi-centric world of “rising regions” (Paupp 2009). This emerging world is the product of both a new normative focus on social justice issues and growing opposition to US-led globalization, militarism, and US-led dominance over the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as global rule-makers without a true global consensus (Aaronson and Zimmerman 2008; Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007; Bhala 2003; Jackson 2006; Toussaint 2005, 2008).
