The Decline of American Hegemony

After WWII, the US led the Western world and maintained this position through 45 years of Cold War with the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, the Cold War’s end and Soviet collapse left America as the world’s “sole superpower”—economically, militarily, and politically. What factors gave birth to American hegemony? What factors helped end it? In this course we will trace the rise, decline, and end of American hegemony focusing on the sources of US power—domestic, economic, international, and strategic—the political bargains that sustained America’s hegemonic position, and the principal factors behind its decline. Readings, films, discussion, group projects, and occasional lectures will help students understand what the US-led international order was, and some of its alternatives absent US hegemony.