US: Crisis of Hegemony or Crisis of the System?

Scholars who have dedicated themselves to the past 600 years of economic and military history of powerful nations agree that, following the fall of the Soviet Union, a process of unipolarity began. This process then started breaking up the economic, commercial, diplomatic and political struggles that had defined a multipolar world, while allowing underdeveloped countries the opportunity to sit at the table and help themselves to a piece of the cake facilitated by globalization.

The new geo-economic scheme, taken from the skin, marrow, guts and brains of financial frameworks whose loose hands gamble and play at will with the real economy — and in this way make capitalism more inhuman so that its individualistic nature incites its principles to dismantle the welfare state, which has the same system, and to save it from collapse — created the smartest protesters, with the logic that distributing collective profits would keep businesses open and functioning properly.

The issue is that the model — as it increased the gap between those who have the tools to adjust market rules to their monetary needs and those who only have their workforces and a few instructions in the fight for a chance to survive — was running into popular, and not so popular, indignation, and the indignant began to claim open spaces for the rights acquired during decades of fighting.

In this context, the United States, vanguard and guard of the system, is beginning to show worrying signs of economic weakness and hegemony.

It’s evident that the first has led to the second because, as Paul Kennedy said in his book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” “[t]here is a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities and military strength.”

Kennedy’s statement, coupled with the reality that is giving rise to multiple economic countries — that until a couple of decades ago were defined as Third World because of their limited contribution to the production of goods and services worldwide — seems to indicate that we live in a joint crisis of unresolved issues related to U.S. hegemony and definitions of leadership, which must lead the world toward more just and humane production as the people, indignant, are demanding when they take to the streets.