FLYNT LEVERETT: ..."As Americans, I think we also need to face up to the flip side of the rise of the rest, which is to some degree a decline in American standing and influence in various international arenas. I would argue that the United States is in an historically unprecedented condition. It emerged from the Cold War as this unquestioned global hegemon.

Now, not even two decades after the end of the Cold War, we have a situation in which the military dimension of American hegemony seems unassailable. If you look out, even with the most optimistic projections of the growth in Chinese, Indian, perhaps Russian, military capabilities, I would argue that the United States is going to have a unique capacity to project large amounts of military power around the world for at least the next two decades, and quite possibly longer than that. So the military dimension of American hegemony seems to be pretty intact.

There are, as always, limits to what military power can do for a hegemon. We seem periodically to need to remind ourselves of that. Perhaps the Iraq war is one such exercise... "

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