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Three times in the twentieth century the United States attempted to use its power to impose a liberal world order: in 1919, 194548, and after the Cold War. We now call it globalization. During the 1990s, the United States has been the miracle economy and its corporations have assumed ascendancy. Since 1996, after President Bill Clinton's re-election, the United States has been increasingly assertive; it has used its power to prop up the Russian President, bully the Chinese into liberalization, push the stagnant Japanese economy towards reform, insist on the "Washington consensus" of liberalization, and try to control the United Nations. In the 1997-98 Asian economic meltdown, the United States used the International Monetary Fund to push for political reform in East Asia. Washington is now using NATO to redefine the meaning of sovereignty in the Balkans. The United States has shifted from being a benign hegemon to an arrogant superpower and this will likely generate a hostile reaction.
The United States entered the twentieth century as the most powerful country in the world. It has retained this status throughout the century, although arguably the German occupation of Europe in the early 1940s provided a brief interruption. This power has been based on a large, well-educated and fairly homogeneous population, a substantial and well-located territory, the world's premier economy, and a state supported by its people and capable of mobilizing its resources for military conflict when the occasion has demanded.
The purposes of the American state have always provided fertile ground for intellectual debate. Unlike, say, the British or French or German states, the United States has rarely resorted to the formulation of mere national interest when announcing its objectives. The balance of power, the securing of natural frontiers, or the creation of a linguistic imagined community have been beneath the dignity of a state pursuing "a world safe for democracy", a "Free World", or a "New World Order". Of course, critics and scholars alike have been quick to describe the United States' traditional diplomatic pursuit of a sphere of interest in the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine or its successive corollaries, and have even seen the doctrines of the balance of power behind its opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But to...