7. American Hegemony, Empire and Unipolarity

Hegemony, empire and unipolarity are used to describe American predominance after the Cold War, both in the broader public debate and in academic literature. However, policy-makers have always refrained from using such terms, although since the middle of the 1990s foreign policy implicitly took American preponderance and leadership of the world community for granted. The G.W. Bush administration moreover implicitly accepted the rise of new great powers and aimed at preserving US predominance. Only during the 2003 dispute with France over the Iraq invasion, polarity language was explicitly used. Multipolarity was rejected but this in first instance referred to differences of view within the NATO alliances, and thus to cluster polarity. Only under the Obama administration multipolarity was accepted as a factual development, but this did not mean that the administration renounced the American leadership role.