The End of Whatever Hegemony Was?

This last Sunday, Parag Khanna published a long excerpt of a new book in the New York Times Magazine. Dan Nexon at Duck of Minerva loved it. Dan Drezner didn’t. I’m pretty much in the camp of the latter Dan, who opined:

I will heap praise on Khanna’s agent for getting the excerpt placed into the Magazine. There’s less demand than there used to be for prose stylings that read like Benjamin Barber after a three-day coke bender in Macao.

For my part, I didn’t really see anything here that hasn’t been better expressed in a dozen other places. Khanna argues that US hegemony has essentially ended, and that the future will see a three way competition between Europe, China, and the US for influence in the “second world,” the definition of which is a trifle nebulous. That’s true as far as it goes, but of course depends a lot on how we define hegemony; Khanna wants to define it in more or less the same way as the most aggressive of neoconservatives define it, which helpfully allows him to declare that America’s hegemonic moment is decisively over. There are, however, more sophisticated conceptions of hegemony that do not carry the implication that hegemonic states can do whatever they want whenever they want. As Kenneth Waltz wrote:

To say that militarily strong states are feeble because they cannot easily bring order to minor states is like saying that a pneumatic hammer is weak because it is not suitable for drilling decayed teeth.

Another way of putting this is that yes, to some extent it’s reasonable to argue that the 21st century will see competition for influence between the United States, China, and the European Union. However, that doesn’t get us very far; each of the three players brings a different set of tools to the competition, and the tools of the United States (outsized military power along with economic competitiveness) determine the rules of the game and the structure of the competition.

Cross-posted to TAPPED.