The United States and Southeast Asia: Change and Continuity in American Hegemony

The United States has been the most powerful country in the world since the Second World War. In the wake of September 11, at a time when the US has an unrivalled ability to project power in any part of the globe, this may seem like a remarkably anodyne observation. Yet it is important to remember that for much of the post-war period the Soviet Union was a formidable adversary that constrained American influence and provided an alternative vision of the way the world might be ordered. We now know, of course, that the Soviet system was incapable of supporting either its military pretensions or the aspirations of much of its citizenry, but this should not blind us to the fact that for many years ideological rivalry and super-power confrontation were the seemingly immutable realities of the post-war order. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, and despite periodic concerns about the performance of the US’s own economy, America has emerged as the sole-superpower and the cornerstone of what is routinely depicted as a unipolar inter-state system (Wohlforth 1999).