Thursday, October 7, 2010

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.