The End of America's "Unipolar Moment"?

I have a problem conceding that we have moved into a world of multipolarity. This would assume that one or more countries have thus increased their political/military/financial clout to the US's level or surpassed that level. I have read the statistics that China has passed Japan as the world's second largest economy and that China holds much of the US trade debt. From a purely economic standpoint I agree that we have moved (or are moving) into multipolarity. Yet many articles which discuss this topic seem to qualify their arguments through alluding to military power.

This source doesn't take a stance on whether the world has moved into multipolarity, yet it illustrates my point in the second paragraph. Using terms like, "...rapidly evolving threat environment." seems to indicate that we are headed towards a war. Perhaps China is poised to utilize the world's largest military against the US? Did I miss those headlines? Does anyone actually believe Iran or North Korea can challenge the US in a full scale military 
confrontation (or any other sort of confrontation for that matter)?


So then what is this discourse about the threat environment which apparently is an argument for multipolarity? Is the global (leaderless) jihad threatening the unipolar order? I am wondering if I am the only one which has noticed these conflicting discourses in polarity discussions.

Video

Video Posted By Cirincione via Twitter:

Just something for those who are still interested in arms control. I feel that arms control is a dying subject, giving-way to the study of irregular warfare and insurgency. Either way, it is still something which needs a significant amount of attention from our policy makers.

New Beginnings

I fly back to London tomorrow morning. Right now I am trying to stay up in order to be able to sleep a bit on this flight.

I'm looking to restart this blog after my dissertation is due; so I will post a few times on this in order to gain some interest, to begin gathering hits again. I may also be bringing on another blogger who posts mainly on Hubpages; he writes primarily on local level, and domestic politics issues. Dissertation is due Sept. 6, looking forward to writing for recreation again.

I may give an executive summary of my dissertation closer to its due date. Due to the possibility the faculty grading it may search passages of my dissertation on the internet, I will not be posting it here. The process of proving this is my blog would be horrifying, I imagine. What I will say it involves a case study of Kazakhstan and makes conclusions about the nature of the state centric system and discourse of the state.

PS: If anyone does read this ever, I'd be interested in hearing ideas for other places to host this blog. I'm thinking this layout looks a bit....bland.