United States' Economic Dominance and Increasing Challengers

Introduction

The U.S. remains the dominant, still hegemonic, power in the world. But it is facing heightened economic pressures and growing strategic necessity. Major transformations are taking place in the world imperialist system. Of central importance are shifts in the distribution of global economic power and the emergence of incipient constellations of geoeconomic and geopolitical power-that is, potential blocs of countries with growing capacity to challenge U.S. global dominance. China is a highly dynamic element in this equation. These phenomena are interacting with other contradictions and conflicts in the world, especially the post-9/11 military offensive of U.S. imperialism and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the difficulties it has been experiencing, and military threats against Iran. The significance of new competitive challenges to U.S. imperialism will be missed if they are measured by the degree to which they present themselves as mirror "counter-hegemony" to U.S. imperialism-militarily, economically, and institutionally. This is not what these challenges embody at this time. And though there are emergent elements of that, they are not concentrated in a single power.

No potential challengers to U.S. imperialism are seeking to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. militarily, or to confront it in a major way, in this current conjuncture. But the existence of these challenges (and challengers) means that U.S. imperialism has to look more and more over its shoulder (Knox, 44-55).

U.S. imperialism is seeking to preserve and extend its supremacy against a backdrop of eroding economic strength and an increasingly fragile and unstable world financial architecture based on the privileged role of the dollar. And, importantly, this is occurring in a period of dynamic flux in the world system-in which new poles of power are appearing as cracks in U.S. global hegemony widen. The collapse of the social-imperialist Soviet bloc in 1989-91 represented the most significant change in inter-imperialist relations since the end of World War 2. The creation of a new, more integrated geopolitical framework for capital accumulation contributed to the acceleration of a massive wave of globalization. This was facilitated by new technologies and consolidated under the U.S.-led project of neo-liberalism: privatization of government assets, opening up of markets to foreign capital, loosening of regulations over business, cutbacks in social spending and labor protections. Leaps in the industrialization of world agriculture and the transnational integration of food production and transport have sped up the destruction of traditional agricultural systems in the countryside of the Third World. This has furthered a process of historically unprecedented urbanization focused in the Third World: the movement of populations from rural areas to cities, the breakneck growth of cities, old and new. For the first time in human history, more than half the world's population lives in cities, with one billion people inhabiting the contemporary slums within and surrounding Third World cities. This is, as Mike Davis aptly put it, a "planet of slums." Also arising, and unexpectedly, out of the particular resolution of contradictions concentrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but involving other ...