This book examines US hegemony and international legitimacy in the post-Cold War era, focusing on its leadership in the two wars on Iraq. The preference for unilateral action in foreign policy under the Bush Administration, culminating in the use of force against Iraq in 2003, has unquestionably created a crisis in the legitimacy of US global leadership. Of central concern is the ability of the United States to act without regard for the values and interests of its allies or for international law on the use of force, raising the question: does international legitimacy truly matter in an international system dominated by a lone superpower? US Hegemony and International Legitimacy explores the relationship between international legitimacy and hegemonic power through an in depth examination of two case studies – the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91 and the Iraq Crisis of 2002-03 – and examines the extent to which normative beliefs about legitimate behaviour influenced the decisions of states to follow or reject US leadership. The findings of the book demonstrate that subordinate states play a crucial role in consenting to US leadership and endorsing it as legitimate and have a significant impact on the ability of a hegemonic state to maintain order with least cost. Understanding of the importance of legitimacy will be vital to any attempt to rehabilitate the global leadership credentials of the United States under the Obama Administration. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, IR theory and security studies. Lavina Rajendram Lee is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University, Australia, and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Sydney.

Human rights is often claimed as the 'idea' of our time. However, although considerable time, energy and resources have been invested in the idea, and extravagant claims are often made about progress in providing machinery for the protection of human rights, there are few signs that violations are any less common than in the past. This book argues that while the USA was instrumental in establishing the 'idea' of human rights as a dominant theme in the day-to-day rhetoric of international relations, powerful economic and political interests succeeded in ensuring that a strong international regime for the protection of human rights did not emerge.

In this book, Arturo Santa-Cruz advances an understanding of power as a social relationship and applies it consistently to the economic realm in United States relations with other countries of the Western Hemisphere. Following the academic and popular debate on the ebb and flow of US hegemony, this work centers the analysis in a critical case for the exercise of US power through its economic statecraft: the Americas—its historical zone of influence. The rationale for the regional focus is methodological: if it can be shown that Washington's sway has decreased in the area since the early 1970s, when the discussion about this matter started, it can be safely assumed that the same has occurred in other latitudes. The analysis focuses on three regions: North America, Central America and South America. Since each region contains countries that have at times maintained very different relationships with the United States, the findings contribute to a better understanding of the practice of US power in the sub-region in question, adding greater variability to the overall results. US Hegemony and the Americas: Power and Economic Statecraft in International Relations is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in Latin American History and Politics, North American Regional Integration, International Relations, Economic Statecraft, Political Economy and Comparative Politics.

The aims of this text are two-fold: to describe and explain US behaviour in and towards a wide range of significant global and regional institutions; and secondly, to examine the impact of US behaviour on the capacity of each organization to meet its own objectives.

From Menem’s new Thatcherite experiment in Argentina, through Fujimori’s unexpected victory in Peru, to Collor’s near defeat at the hands of the rapidly growing Workers’ Party of Brazil, Latin American politics is once again in turmoil. Whilst military dictators have been dumped from office, their liberal and populist replacements have found television exposure and playboy reputations insufficient to hold together societies still remorselessly squeezed insufficient to hold together societies still remorselessly squeezed by United States foreign policy. But US influence in the subcontinent is not only under siege from the impoverished masses of increasingly unstable states; it is also threatened by intensifying superpower competition as Japan and a unifying Europe mount their challenges for world dominance. In this wide-ranging and original polemic, Petras and Morley examine the social structures which emerged from neo-liberal economic policy during the 1970s and 1980s. they show how Latin American society is increasingly organized around a continental bourgeoisie maintaining high levels of foreign investment, a national bourgeoisie operating on the margins of legality and committed to both economic deregulation and public-sector activity, and a growing class of low-paid and poorly employed workers subject to the demands of export-oriented capital into international financial circuits is matched by technical and intellectual integration, with a collapse into conformity of formerly critical groupings. For students and the interested general reader, this balanced and rigorous analysis of state power and social form provides a substantial new framework in which to consider the exigent questions of US-Latin American relations.

Over the last decade, the United States' position as the world's most powerful state has appeared increasingly unstable. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, non-traditional security threats, global economic instability, the apparent spread of authoritarianism and illiberal politics, together with the rise of emerging powers from the Global South have led many to predict the end of Western dominance on the global stage. This book brings together scholars from international relations, economics, history, sociology and area studies to debate the future of US leadership in the international system. The book analyses the past, present and future of US hegemony in key regions in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, Europe and Africa – while also examining the dynamic interactions of US hegemony with other established, rising and re-emerging powers such as Russia, China, Japan, India, Turkey and South Africa. American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers explores how changes in the patterns of cooperation and conflict among states, regional actors and transnational non-state actors have affected the rise of emerging global powers and the suggested decline of US leadership. Scholars, students and policy practitioners who are interested in the future of the US-led international system, the rise of emerging powers from the Global South and related global policy challenges will find this multidisciplinary volume an invaluable guide to the shifting position of American hegemony.

This analysis of the United States and energy security examines the close relationship between US military supremacy in oil-rich regions and America's maintenance of global power. Energy security generally evokes thoughts of American intervention in the Middle East to protect US interests in that region's oil-rich fields. Doug Stokes and Sam Raphael move beyond that framework to consider US actions in Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa. Drawing on State and Defense Department records and other primary sources and previous scholarship, they show how US foreign policy since World War II has sought to maintain a global energy security regime that supports the nation's allies while maintaining American hegemony. Stokes and Raphael explain how US intervention in energy-rich states insulates and stabilizes those nations' transnationally oriented actors and political economies and why American oil diversification strategy strengthens the country's position against rivals in the global capitalist system. They argue that counterinsurgency aid and other types of coercive US statecraft protect the recipient states from an array of potentially revolutionary armed and unarmed internal social forces, thereby securing the energy supplies of nations deemed strategically important to the United States or its allies. Clear and accessible, this cutting-edge contemporary policy analysis will engage scholars of US foreign policy and international relations as well as policymakers grappling with the importance of energy security in today's world.

This book provides an overview of evolving patterns of trade partnership with historical perspective. It presents changing requirements of industry competitiveness and explains the vital relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. As well, it further examines the interactive relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. In recent years, with decreasing strategic alliances among nations and less visibility of international governance mechanisms (e.g., WTO) and counter to globalization, preferential trade agreements and free-trade agreements have proliferated among nations. At the same time, industrial competitiveness is becoming a serious strategic policy priority of nations—both advanced and emerging economies. Theoretical discussion focuses on the practices of global network capabilities for the top of the pyramid (ToP) and base of the pyramid (BoP). Special focus is on trade partnerships and industry competitiveness in the Asian economies (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia), three ASEAN nations (Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia), and Mexico. Extensive industry and firm-level case studies discuss ToP and BoP interface capabilities in the form of manufacturing and services life-cycle management, which extends value creation and delivery of manufacturing and services. This extension integrates the cloud ecosystem, such as timely data/information/knowledge flows via the virtual world; and ground value chains, such as the flow of complex real goods and services in the visible world.

Between 1973 and 1980, the cost of crude oil rose suddenly and dramatically, precipitating convulsions in international politics. Conventional wisdom holds that international capital markets adjusted automatically and remarkably well: enormous amounts of money flowed into oil-rich states, and efficient markets then placed that new money in cash-poor Third World economies. David Spiro has followed the money trail, and the story he tells contradicts the accepted beliefs. Most of the sudden flush of new oil wealth didn't go to poor oil-importing countries around the globe. Instead, the United States made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it U.S. securities in secret, a deal resulting in a substantial portion of Saudi assets being held by the U.S. government. With this arrangement, the U.S. government violated its agreements with allies in the developed world. Spiro argues that American policymakers took this action to prop up otherwise intolerable levels of U.S. public debt. In effect, recycled OPEC wealth subsidized the debt-happy policies of the U.S. government as well as the debt-happy consumption of its citizenry.

Dr Stephen Gill examines the extent and nature of Americas as a hegemonic state.