The United States' days as the global hegemon are coming to an end, according to certain foreign policy experts but, which country is most likely to replace it?
Randall L. Schweller, a professor of political science at the Ohio State University, claims that the world will no longer have a single superpower to bring order to international politics. The global hegemony concept does not apply in our era, he stresses. "The United States remains an important power, but it knows that it no longer towers over all contenders," writes Randall Schweller in his article "The Age of Entropy: Why the New World Order Won't Be Orderly." "Plagued by ballooning debt, Washington has narrowed its foreign policy to a few basic objectives. Yet the deterioration of 'Pax Americana' is not due solely to the United States' declining power. It is also a problem of will - one rooted in fading national resolve to use those power advantages that the United States still enjoys," the professor emphasizes. According to Mr. Schweller, the world will most likely consist of a variety of powers, including nations, multinational corporations, ideological movements, global crime and terror groups, and human rights organizations. International politics will no longer be an ordered system, based on predictable and relatively constant principles. Instead, we will face a far more erratic system, unsettled and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy measures the disorganization in a system. "Disorder" is the word that will characterize future international politics, explains the professor. The digital revolution is only adding fuel to the flame, notes Randall Schweller: information spreads further than ever before, it rains down faster and thicker by the day. Thus, an information overload causes a general sense of banality and loss of meaning, people feel that an "irremediable flatness is coming over the world". Mr. Schweller depicts the future of humanity as everlasting "purgatory": the new world of rising structural and informational entropy will have neither sharp falls nor rises. We will not suffer from a world war or utter economic catastrophe. This lasting peace will not, however, be heaven on earth either: instead, "we are on the cusp of an eternal purgatory". Is there a way out? No, says the professor. Like Sisyphus, humanity will be involved in an eternal and meaningless struggle and, "like Sisyphus, we need to embrace the unknowable, to accept our unintelligible world and our futile struggle to come to terms with its incomprehensibility. For better or worse, we have no other choice," Randall Schweller concludes. Ekaterina Blinova, Source: The Voice of Russia
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