The Mysterious Case of Suicidal Hegemony. Or, Is the West Really Dead?

By Goedele De Keersmaeker

Prof. Dr. Goedele De Keersmaeker is a professor with the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies (GIES).

After the Cold War, until late in the years 2000, many American theorists predicted a lasting American unipolarity or described the United States in terms of a benevolent, liberal hegemon. Trump policy defies these analyses. This article puts forward different reasons for why balance of power and hegemonic theory, as well as liberal institutionalism could not predict this. Apart from Trump’s personality it also points to some weaknesses in the theoretical frameworks used and argues that they are based on a Western/European biased interpretation of history.

Introduction*

In the Spring of 2001 John Ikenberry published a much-cited monograph under the title ‘After Victory’. Combining realist and liberal hegemonic thinking, long-cycle analysis, and liberal institutionalism, Ikenberry analysed how victorious powers established new international orders after major conflicts. He discussed the usual suspects of political science analyses on establishing international orders: the British post-Napoleonic order, the failed Wilsonian experiment in Versailles (1918) and the establishment of a new American order in the Western world after 1945. This last order expanded after the fall of communism in 1989-1991. In each case Ikenberry stressed the importance of institution building as well as strategic restraint by the world leader or hegemon, if you prefer this last term for the most powerful state.

But twenty-five years later, ‘After Victory’ illustrates above all the triumphalist undertone that marked many post-Cold War American analyses until deep into the years 2000. The cover of the book enhances this impression. It featured an 1840 painting by Delacroix picturing the 1204 entrance of crusader leader Baldwin of Flanders into Constantinople. Baldwin’s crusaders had made a detour on their way to Jerusalem, sacked the capital of the Orthodox Eastern Empire, and he became emperor of a new Latin Empire. This artificial construct did not last, the only long-term result being a serious weakening of the Byzantine Empire once the crusaders and their descendants had gone. One wonders how some months before 9/11 and two years after the crisis between Russia and NATO over Kosovo, this 19th century orientalist painting ended up on the cover of a monograph preaching institution building and strategic restraint.

American hegemony?

Of course, this kind of subtle, perhaps unconscious, triumphalism was not unique. Those were the days when Madeleine Albright (1998) described the United States as the ‘indispensable nation.’ At the other end of the political spectrum Charles Krauthammer (2004) elaborated his 1990 thesis of the unipolar moment, which was supposed to last longer than just a moment. International conferences compared 19th century British with 20th century American hegemony (O’Brien & Clesse, 2001). The historian Paul Kennedy (2-2-2002), who in the 1980s warned American policymakers for ‘imperial overstretch’, now admitted it: ‘The Eagle has Landed’, American power was simply unrivalled. Balance of power thinkers, had theoretical worries: why did no balancing occur? Wohlforth gave the simple answer: the U.S. had become so powerful that the balance of power mechanism no longer functioned. The world was out of balance, the US was the unipole and would remain so for the foreseeable future (Brooks & Wohlforth, 2008; Wohlforth, 1999). This was followed by a whole string of academic publications debating the consequences of this situation, a tradition Layne (2009) labelled the ‘unipolar stability theory’. It continued until very recently (see e.g. Græger et al., 2022). From a liberal-institutionalist perspective Robert Nye (2002, 2004) coined the concept soft power and argued that no nation had ever had such an overwhelming cultural, economic and military power as the United States, who should use and increase it by a multilateral foreign policy.

Of course, not all theorists agreed with this lasting predominance. Mearsheimer for example predicted as early as 2001 that China's economic rise would inevitably lead to its growing military power and tensions with the United States. Power transition theorists at the time, made a similar analysis (see e.g. Tammen et al, 2000). But in any case, a very large group of academics were convinced that American hegemony was there to stay.

Twenty-five years later, these writings are witnesses of a different, long ago historical era. Since the Obama-administration the US at least implicitly acknowledges that the times of absolute supremacy are over, that American hegemony is rejected by actors as different as Putin’s Russia or Al-Qaida and ISIS, that China became a serious competitor, that globalisation and international institutions put limits to American power. And now we are confronted with a frustrated United States, run by a bully president instead of a ‘benevolent hegemon’. Only few balance of power theorists, hegemonic thinkers, or liberal institutionalists, predicted this. How to explain this failure? We give some elements of a possible answer, with a focus on security issues.

Trumpian escapades

To start with, international relations theory usually does not pay too much attention to the personalities of political leaders and their aides. But with Donald Trump analysts are confronted with an extremely difficult case. Theorists suppose that states and thus their leaders have a basic rationality, that they have a more or less coherent framework of goals, even if these goals come down to mere national self-interest and military and economic power. But just describing Trump’s approach as transactional will not do. How to explain the deliberate chaos in the first months of the new administration? Even the Heritage Foundation in its infamous ‘Project 2025’ did not suggest abolishing USAID overnight, only to profoundly reorganise it and reorient its goals. Trump is openly interested in his personal enrichment and image, not that of the United States. He listens to the last person he spoke to and loves to be seen at the side of mighty leaders like Putin or Xi. Photo sessions and media attention seem to be more important than results. Remember Kim and Trump in Singapore. The scandalous White House confrontation with Zelensky was good television. Wanting to receive the Nobel Peace Prize because another, detested president got it, is narcissism, not a rational foreign policy goal. Bullying one of your most loyal allies about a territory over which you already have an unrestricted military control, is not rational.

National Security Strategies always include a lot of waffle, but the 2025 version lacks basic coherence. Different chapters seem to be written by different people without any consultation between them. For example, they do not calculate GDP in the same way. The highly ideological part on Europe contrasts with the realpolitik approach elsewhere in the text. For realists it makes no sense to upset your major allies by openly planning to interfere in their internal affairs, while at the same time stating that you are not interested in the political regimes of China or Russia. Anne Applebaum (2025), admittedly an outspoken opponent of Trump, called the National Security Strategy the longest suicide note in American history.

In short, in 2001 no international theorist, from whatever strand could have predicted such escapades.

A frustrated hegemon

Secondly, the success of the ‘Make American Great Again’ slogan and the MAGA-movement proves that a substantial part of the American public does not feel ‘great’. Behind Trump lies the self-perception of a world power that realises it loses its predominant position and is deeply upset by this. Power transition theorists and cyclical thinkers describe international relations in terms of the dynamic between an old, dominant power that wants to maintain the order it established and a new emerging power that is unsatisfied and challenges this order (see e.g. Modelski, 1987). But why should a rising power by definition be dissatisfied (Chan, 2008)? Why should a dominant power always be satisfied, especially as hegemony comes with a cost? Today we see a hegemon that creates chaos and wants to dismantle the order it established. But the Chinese challenger seems satisfied with the existing economic order and projects an image of guarantor of the international order, despite his growing military power.

The (mis)use of history

Thirdly, there is the use of historical data. Hegemonic and liberal-institutionalist like Ikenberry consider post-Napoleonic Britain as the architect of the great power concert that provided security on the European continent. This interpretation is debatable. For one thing, it ignores the crucial role of Russia in the establishment of the Vienna settlement, while London prevented more far-reaching institutionalised cooperation in the first decade after 1815. Moreover, in contrast to nowadays liberal interpretation of the concert, it had a bad reputation with the democratic and national movements in Europe, for whom it was instrument of repression and reaction (see Hungary 1849 and many others).

Similarly, did the US really create a law-based international order in 1945? During the Cold War this was hardly the case. The security provisions in the UN Charter largely remained a dead letter. The role of the Security Council remained limited, as is illustrated by the small number of resolutions adopted between 1945 and 1985, at which point Gorbachev’s (not Reagan’s) new foreign policy revived the Council. Using its veto right was a widespread practice by both the Americans and the Soviets. The Trump administration is not the first one that left intergovernmental organizations, withdrew from or never signed/ratified international treaties. So there exists a relatively recent American tradition which seems indifferent to a law-based internation order.

One can object that many hegemonic analyses are limited to the United States and its Western, mainly European, allies. This group was indeed a rule-based security community. But it had its roots in the highly ideologically East-West divide. American leadership over the Western camp was only one part of this broader, bipolar, ideological, and military confrontation that constituted the defining feature of the Cold War. This Western security community expanded after 1990, foremost in Europe, but much less so in other parts of the world. People from Tehran and Ho Chi Minh City to Manila and Santiago de Chile will be stunned by the narrative of an American law-based international order. The decolonisation process was part of the larger East-West confrontation and made the West support right wing dictators. Remember Marcos or Pinochet. American military intervention, directly or by proxy, was no exception. Remember Vietnam. Genocide did happen without any Western reaction. Remember Cambodia. The focus on Europe and the East-West conflict might explain why so few analysts foresaw the rise of China, and other emerging economies. But above all it might explain why the American or Western model is less attractive to many in the Global South than soft power analyses suggest.

This is even more the case when we describe British hegemony as a 19th century liberal predecessor of the US. This amounts to a distortion of history. 19th century Britain was indeed a model for other Western powers. But imperialism, formal and informal colonisation were an essential part of that model, copied by European countries, large and small, and by the United States. Though Americans often see themselves as anti-imperialists, the United States grew out of 18th century white settlers colonies and had all their typical characteristics: racism, inequality, war of conquest, use of violence against indigenous people, interference in the internal affairs of small states, gunboat diplomacy (the 19th century equivalent of limited missile strikes), buying or exchanging land owned by other great powers. Every American learns about the Louisiana purchase, a typical real estate deal between France and the United States. It sounds familiar today. But even in Europe, every Pole knows about the three late 18th century Polish divisions, deals that are also part of Ukrainian and broader European history. This continued until the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.

Trump’s transactional approach is primarily meant for his peers: China and Russia. The rest can be bombed, blackmailed, divided into spheres of influence, exchanged or annexed (remember Crimea, so why not Greenland). This is not to say that Trump considers Xi and Putin his eternal friends. They are his rivals, he at times provokes them but he respects them, because they are powerful. Given the Trump administration’s authoritarian tendencies, there is a risk that the supposed liberal hegemony will be replaced by a new reactionary concert between the US, Russia and China, who divide the world into spheres of influence by give-and-take deals.

Is the West really dead?

So, what about Europe, the core of the American hegemonic space? In 2019 Macron declared NATO brain death. He delivered this death certificate too hastily. The Russian invasion in Ukraine reanimated the alliance. External threats are the best glue. But whether NATO will survive an assault from its own leader, remains a big question mark. It might become irrelevant, fade away, or turn itself in a more European-dominated group. The losers in this process are above all the Ukrainians, perhaps the Greenlanders, but also the European Atlantists. The case for European strategic autonomy, which the Europeanists have defended for decades, is now clearly proven, whether NATO stays around or not.

Maybe the following happens. In Trump’s simplistic world view, Europe is a competitor on the economic level and a free riding potential competitor in the security field. This view is close to Putin’s. For both, the perspective of a stronger more integrated Europe is unwelcome because it is in its own complicated way an emerging great power that has to be stopped. Thus, they make use of the procedural and other weaknesses of the European institutions and the volatility of a segmented European public opinion, to kill the chicken in the egg. It is remarkable that none of the theorists, especially from the balance of power strand, have predicted this. This might be explained by a blind angle in many theories: their ignorance of the European integration process, and their fixation with the existing nation-state. But there is also no historical precedent for the unique but tortuous European integration process.  The result could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to growing European military cooperation and the end of the Atlantic security community.

But will this really happen? Is the West really dead? The answer is uncertain. The Trump administration wants to revive American hegemony over Europe, by breaking the integration process and redivide it into small nation-states, the US can dominate. It also wants to rescue its own interpretation of the West. Theorists have always supposed that the Western hegemon is pro-free trade, pro-market economy, pro-democracy, pro-human rights, pro-equality. But these values are not the only ones in the European and broader Western tradition. There is another much darker past. Most European states at one moment or another have been under right wing reactionary, nationalist, authoritarian rule or witnessed the rise of such movements. Germany and Italy indeed, but also most other states. The ambition to support these right-wing antidemocratic movements is openly expressed both by Vance in his Munich Speech and in the National Security Strategy. So, to question: ‘Is the West really dead?’ we can only answer with another question: ‘Which West?’

Endnotes and references

* Evidently this title is inspired by Bruce Russett’s 1985 article, an excellent critique of hegemonic thinking.

Albright, M. (1998). Transcript: Albright interview on NBC-TV February 19. USIS Washington File.

Applebaum, A. (16-12-2025). The longest suicide note in American history. The Atlantic.

Brooks, S. G. & Wohlforth, W. C. (2008). World out of balance: International relations and the challenge of American primacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chan, S. (2008). China, the U.S., and the power transition theory. London/New York: Routledge.

Ikenberry, G. J. (2001). After Victory: Institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Græger, N. et al, (Eds.). (2022). Polarity in International Relations: Past, Present, Future. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heritage Foundation (2025). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. Washington, Heritage Foundation. 

Kennedy, P. (2-2-2002). The eagle has landed. The Financial Times.

Krauthammer, C. (1990/1991). The unipolar moment. Foreign Affairs, 70(1), 23-33.

Krauthammer, C. (2004). Democratic realism: An American foreign policy for a unipolar world. Washington, D. C.: AEI Press.

Layne, C. (2009). The waning of U. S. hegemony: myth or reality? A review essay. International Security, 34(1), 147-172.

Macron, E. (7-11-2019). Emmanuel Macron warns Europe: NATO is becoming brain-dead. The Economist.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

Modelski, G. (1987). Long cycles in world politics. London: Macmillan.

Nye, J. S. (2002). The paradox of American power: Why the world's only superpower can't go it alone. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The means to success in world politics. New York: Public Affairs.

O’Brien, P. K. & Clesse, A. (Eds.) (2002). Two hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1741-2001. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Russett, B. (1985). The mysterious case of vanishing hegemony; or Is Mark Twain really dead? International Organization (39)2, p. 207-231.

The White House (2025). National security strategy of the United States of America.

Wohlforth, W. C. (1999). The stability of a unipolar world. International Security, 24(1), 5-41.