This piece explores the controversial thesis that the United States strategically and consistently maneuvers against the emergence of regional hegemons across the globe. Whether it is Russia in the former Soviet space or China across the South China Sea, the United States works to disallow the expression of regional hegemonic power despite its own continued reliance on its global hegemony being accepted. Up to now, most examinations have considered this simply an exercise of American foreign policy and global positioning according to its own best interests. What has gone largely absent from this is how much our understanding of American hegemony (its structure, its theoretical underpinnings, and its ultimate purpose over time) can provide a better explanation not just of American positions but also the interaction with major regional powers in this first fifth of the 21st century.
What is more intriguing to this project is teasing out that consensual/coercive dynamic within American global hegemony, how it has impacted the development of regional power around the globe, and to what ultimate purpose. Some works have deftly pointed out that this consensual/coercive diode has quite literally created a dual state: the ever-famous democratic one and the less-recognized security state. The former is always highlighted by the United States and touted as the reason why American power should not ever be considered an empire proper, that its initiatives and actions can rightly be seen as endeavoring to help the global common good in numerous and diverse ways. The latter is less public but increasingly more potent and seems to be behind many global maneuvers that work against the ideals and principles of liberal Western traditions (think invasive mass surveillance, rendition and indefinite detention, torture, and the violation of sovereignty). While some like to point out these two ‘states’ of hegemony as diametrically opposed to one another, this work posits a perhaps controversial assertion: that they are instead two sides of the same American power coin and have, for years, regularly been interchanged, often with one being used to justify and rationalize the need for the other.
Some have even taken to giving it a sinister-sounding autonomous nickname, The Deep State. But this paper rejects the notion that the Deep State is something running perniciously alongside regular transparent power and undermining its most coveted principles. Rather, it is the functional amoral center of American foreign policy power and it has for a long time been actively serving the purpose of prolonging its global hegemony and preventing the emergence of any other contenders on the regional level. American hegemony is not resting on its laurels and it is not going complacently into the good night. It is, and has been, fighting tooth and nail for its continued dominance on the world stage and has viewed regional hegemonic power expression as a challenge of relevance that demands elimination.
This is not so much global conspiracy theory as merely sound strategy. The United States from the very beginning of the unipolar era has strongly sought to have its power equated not so much to its own individual rational pursuit of national security interests, but rather as the projection of what some call ‘democratic hegemonism.’ This form is easily the most benevolent: not linked to either single-state dominance or class superiority, democratic hegemonism is seen as a fragile consensus of ideals, perceptions, and values demanding a nurturing environment of like-minded states striving to achieve an international system epitomized by civil liberties, freedom, social activism, and transparent democratic institutions. While this is indeed laudable as a goal for humanity, it is curious that we have not been able to draw strategic lines between this project and the manner in which America has always tried to project is global power hegemonically. If you can get others to buy into the idea that your power is somehow ‘good for all,’ then anyone rising to assert their own grander power gestures would not just be about themselves, or even about challenging the United States, but actually serving as agitators against the common global good.
It is an interesting conception, given that the US has so actively tried to suppress publicity away from its pursuit of national interests and cloak/veil them instead under the guise of this benevolent form of hegemony. In short, rather than being two different kinds, the security state in America has sought to rationalize its own actions by convincing others it is in fact working for democratic hegemonism. Indeed, another form of this has been how globalization (the supposed projection of democratic economic hegemonism for the benefit of all) has been accompanied by a powerful increase in American military spending and investment in military R&D. Indeed, the foreign sales of American weaponry has de facto resulted in the deputizing of the select chosen few to act as regional stewards in the name of American global hegemony.
America has always prospered under this idealized image projected outward across the globe. Some might even argue it has been a powerful driver of policy. But what is more likely is that the driver of the policy has been institutionalizing American global hegemonic power and using these idealized images as the means to get to that end. It is this aspect of double standards that levels accusations of hypocrisy against the United States and fuels some of the most virulently powerful anti-Americanism. Indeed, this work is an advancement of what has now been considered a time/context-dependent argument: most of the above critiques exploded during the mid-to-late 00s, what with America in the throes of two open wars and countless other military maneuvers in the Global War on Terror. They were ostensibly anti-Bush critiques about what had been done to real American values, as it were. But we have had two new Presidents since George W. Bush and our foreign policy positions and global power projections have not dramatically altered. Thus, these critiques need to be reevaluated not in the light of simply criticizing a president but in assessing the continued American desire to maintain its global hegemony. And that desire goes beyond individual leader personality and above political party.
Be warned: this is not a hyper-liberal diatribe against the US trying to maximize its power to the fullest. That is the realist system of international relations we still exist in today. It is, however, a criticism of the academy for not making the realization explicit of how the security state is literally pretending to represent benevolent democratic hegemonism while perhaps only pursuing selfish interests. This present argument adds a new dimension and relevance to the neorealist vs. Gramscian hegemony debate: the neorealist version emphasizes the role of a great power to set up institutions, policing, norms, etc. The Gramscian version focuses not on brute force but on ideas and consensus, on the establishment of dominance by consent through means of ideological and political leadership. To an extent, at least when it comes to American power, this debate has been a false one: the so-called struggle between the security state and democratic hegemonism in America has been no struggle at all. The relationship was misdiagnosed: America has, in the 21st century, been propping up a publicly-declared Gramscian notion of hegemony while simultaneously enforcing it and overwhelming potential regional challengers to it with a decidedly aggressive neorealist form of great power hegemony. This combination, never before made explicit, has been monumentally successful in frustrating and blocking regional hegemonic efforts to influence critical global security neighborhoods, especially given the United States has engineered a powerful misdirection against many fine intellectuals: by making them believe in a fictitious Deep State that is secretly marauding against more transparent American interests, they are missing the less mysterious but perhaps even more impressively dangerous political reality.