Andrew Latham
The post-Cold War hegemonic fantasy is finally dead.
But you wouldn’t know it from listening to Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
From K Street to Foggy Bottom to think tanks stacked with credentialed nostalgia, the old gospel still holds.
American hegemony is indispensable, American power is unbounded, and the rest of the world would fall into chaos if the United States stopped trying to micromanage it.
That reality died years ago – only the mythology lingers. Unipolarity wasn’t permanent. It was a fluke, born of Soviet collapse, Chinese weakness, and a divided Europe. For a brief moment, the United States really did seem to sit atop the world, dictating terms, writing rules, and enforcing order. But that moment was always going to end. And now, long after the facts have changed, the strategy remains stubbornly the same.
The world today is defined not by primacy but by rivalry. China has risen – not as a partner, but as a challenger. Russia, battered and brittle, still lashes out where it can. Iran remains a regional problem the U.S. can’t solve and shouldn’t try to. India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia – each is playing its own game, pursuing its own interests, with no intention of subordinating its strategy to American preferences. Even allies in Europe and Asia are hedging, questioning whether the U.S. can still be counted on – or whether it’s overextended, distracted, and drifting.
America – No Longer the Indispensable Nation
It’s not a failure of strength. It’s a failure of imagination. American power remains formidable, but it can no longer carry the weight of a global strategy designed for a world that no longer exists. What we need now is not more ambition – but more clarity. We need a strategy grounded in restraint. Not retreat, not disengagement, but the kind of disciplined realism that once guided American statecraft during far more dangerous times than these.
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