The Grand Chessboard

Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.

With the more endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford.

To put it very simply, anyone can become an American, but only a Chinese can be Chinese - and that places an additional and significant barrier in the way of any essentially national global hegemony.

In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but is also likely to be the very last.

It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.

The language of the internet is English, and an overwhelming proportion of the global computer chatter also originates from America, influencing the content of global conversation.

There is an element of delusional obsession in the French political elite's preoccupation with the notion that France is still a global power.

Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.

The dynamic character of China's nonstatist economic transformation, including its social openness to the rest of the world, is not mutually compatible in the long run with a relatively closed and bureaucratically rigid Communist dictatorship.

Fortunately for America, Eurasia is too big to be politically one. Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.

The scope of America's global hegemony is admittedly great, but its depth is shallow, limited by both domestic and external restraints.