| Summary: |
American leaders had contradictory goals in the decades following
World War II. They wanted to foster democracy and economic development,
but were opposed to left-wing
parties and governments.
They wanted the order they associated with hierarchy and to preserve
the United States’ extraordinary position in 1945 as far and away the
world’s most powerful country. Policy makers sometimes made trade-offs
among these goals, as they did by consistently supporting right-wing
dictatorships over their democratic opponents in the name of anticommunism.
More often than not they denied trade-offs,
convincing
themselves they could pursue all these goals simultaneously.
American academics catered to this illusion by developing the concept
of hegemony. It made it appear that hierarchy in the form of American
hegemony was beneficial to democracy and development and was
welcomed by major actors everywhere outside the Soviet bloc. Americans
considered Moscow’s opposition to US hegemony as opposition to
global order and thus a sign of aggressive intentions. A growing bloc of
neutrals who also expressed their disquiet, with India as its most vocal
spokesmen, were dismissed as misguided, or even as dupes of Moscow.
Instead of speaking truth to power, international relations scholars,
with few notable exceptions, became spokesmen, therapists, and
propagandists on behalf of the burgeoning national security establishment
for the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy.
Almost seventy years later, American realists and liberals continue
to defend hegemony in theory and practice. They ignore the evidence
that hegemony was only partial and short-lived
and that American efforts
to maintain order (e.g., in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq) were a
primary source of disorder in the international system. Despite ample
evidence to the contrary, they delude themselves into believing that
most of the world welcomes American leadership and that its policies
invariably engender stability.
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