The Paradox of American Power

The paradox of American power: in forgoing its national interest, it builds institutions that strengthen it. To do so, it relies on other countries to finance it. This weakens it. The American system is reciprocal, and creates stability in the short run, but instability over time. To offset this, it needs to maintain an ideological and technological advantage, as the basis for economic advantage. Sacrifice is the keyword to reciprocity, balanced by strength. Increasingly this strength is premised on dominance of key platform technologies within networks (not just technological, but linguistic, ideational, financial, economic, and political). American power is vested in the stable order created by these relationships; it functions as a platform power.

In contrast, the German hegemonic and Chinese hegemonic systems exhibit different core characteristics. The German hegemonic system is fundamentally extractive, as the response to the EU financial crisis has shown. The Chinese system is built on ethnic discretion, not universal ideas. The former forms the foundation of collapse, the latter the problem of incompleteness. The interesting development to watch will the influence of modernity on the Chinese capacity to promote universal forms of power, both pragmatic and ideological.