Daniel Nexon, Georgetown University
On January 21st, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order that “temporarily” suspended all “U.S. foreign assistance programs for 90 days” in order to “determine” which “aligned with his policy goals.”[1] Although foreign aid comprises a tiny percentage of the annual U.S. budget, the freeze had major global consequences. It may, for example, result in the collapse of key sources of independent news media in a number of repressive and war-torn countries.[2] Some analysts estimated that the freeze could result in the deaths of tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of people who face starvation and lack crucial medical care. Even after the State Department issued a humanitarian waiver, disruptions and confusion plagued many lifesaving programs.[3]
The United States is far from the only international donor. China is also a major source of foreign assistance, and its total spending likely now exceeds that of the United States; the European Union, if one includes its member-states’ own programs, also spends more than the United States on international assistance.[4] But the disruptions caused by Trump’s are far from the only indicator of the size and scale of the U.S. global footprint. The U.S. armed forces operate, in one way or another, in every region of the world. U.S. alliances, guarantees, and military actions profoundly shape global international security. It played a key role in creating and, at least until a few weeks ago, underwriting the most important institutions of global governance. The dollar dominates, by a wide margin, international monetary order. U.S. banks remain central to global financial flows. During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, it was the U.S. Federal Reserve that backstopped the teetering global economy.[5]
Nonetheless, most analysts and governments argue that the era of U.S. unipolarity is over. They do not necessarily agree on whether the emerging international system is bipolar or multipolar—and they seldom explain why it matters one way or the other. We can argue over whether China and Russia qualify as “peer competitors” of the United States, but that distinction does not change the fact that both countries have eroded U.S. global dominance and, as of 2025, mounted successful political challenges to the United States and its allies.
Europe’s future remains uncertain. The second Trump administration might push the European Union (EU) to embrace strategic autonomy. In a decade it could become a major military power in its own right, or, perhaps helped along by U.S. and Russian meddling and the rise of its own right-wing populist forces, succumb to fracture and fragmentation. Then there are the perennially emerging great powers, including Brazil and India. Japan is a great power hiding in plain sight, but one currently so militarily intertwined with the United States that its mix of capabilities require fighting alongside American forces.[6]
The second Trump administration, for its part, appears intent on a program of “geopolitical suicide,” in which it attacks the very infrastructure—including U.S. alliances, international institutions, and U.S. centrality in the global financial system—that undergirds U.S. hegemony.[7] Trump himself, for instance, seems unaware of the degree that, for example, his ability to threaten allies with financial and trade sanctions depends on their continued willingness to make themselves vulnerable to the United States.[8] Key decisionmakers in the Trump administration apparently share his belief that American “power” is simply about having a large military and even a larger economy.
They, as Rebecca Solnit puts it, “fail to understand that we live in a world of intricate systems. Immigrants keep [American’s] food and construction industries and quite a bit of our medical systems going. The climate is not something you can pretend doesn’t matter and isn’t changing. They imagine a simple world of static objects they can move around or dump.”[9]
Our baseline theories of international hegemony—the kind we outline in mainstream, introductory courses—are not stupid. The scholars who use them, by and large, understand that we live—and have for quite some time—in a world of “intricate systems.” But their theories of international politics also typically imagine a “simple world of static objects,” in which hegemony can be reduced to holding a preponderant “stock” of military primacy, which in turn derives, although in ways mediated by intervening variables of various kinds, from possessing a large economy. As I understand matters, the same understanding of international hegemony tends to animate policy discussions about the Middle East and other world regions.
We are talking, in essence, about the assumption of a realist “states-under-anarchy” model. In this world, the myriad social, military, and economic networks that link states, societies, organizations, and individuals barely merit an afterthought. Practices and performances make for good stories, and little else. Only “hard” or “material” power (sometimes economic, always military) truly matters. Other forms of capital are not, in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, relevant when it comes to the “field” of international power politics.[10] Social movements and non-state organizations barely register.
I would imagine that this model of the world is incomprehensible to scholars who work on the Middle East and North Africa. There, non-state violence-wielding organizations compete with the armies of states. Some of those states are less national-territorial than composite. Cross-cutting ethnic, religious, and ideological ties have profoundly shaped “international” politics since the Ottoman period. The trajectory of state formation is, as Gause and Ryan reminds us, impossible to grasp without reference to the practices of a succession of external great powers.
Yet, many continue to see the Middle East as the epitome of a realist system based on its frequent wars, domestic authoritarianism, limited institutionalization, and disregard for international law and global norms. This entails a failure to think in terms of counterfactuals: to ask how those politics would play out in a different international order. It also represents a category error: modern realist theories are attempts to explain realpolitik behavior. The presence of power politics, no matter how cutthroat, does not necessarily imply that we should reach for realist theory to explain it.[11]
Indeed, the Realist model of hegemony, long dominant, is no longer the only game in town—not, one might say, hegemonic. Much work in hegemony studies remains focused, for understandable reasons, on the conditions that make great-power war more or less likely.[12] Graham Allison’s “Thucydides trap” is simply a popularized version of power-transition theory and the “theory of hegemonic war.”[13] But research on international hegemony has moved well beyond the “states-under-anarchy” model, or at least heavily qualified it.[14] We are, some claim, in the midst of a “third wave” of international hegemony studies, one marked by, first, greater theoretical pluralism and, second, much greater attention to the politics of hegemony and hegemonic orders.[15]
This essay lays out the key components of this third wave and suggests how it might lead both Middle East experts to rethink their approach to US primacy.
The (New) New Hegemony Studies
Nothing drives the development of hegemonic-order theory more than anxiety about hegemonic decline. The multiple economic crises of the 1970s, including the collapse of the original Bretton Woods System, provide the backdrop for hegemonic-stability theory. Ikenberry’s After Victory became the academic anchor for those who thought that George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemption was a mortal threat to American leadership.[16] The “third wave” of hegemony studies is, in the main, a creature of the rise of China. But it also has developed in a very different disciplinary context than prior waves.
First, Marxist international-relations theory, especially in the United States, almost totally collapsed along with the Soviet Union. Realism occupies a precarious position in the discipline, while constructivism has splintered into distinct research programs. More broadly, the “paradigm wars” have mostly wound down, and few IR scholars still use them to organize their books and articles. This has enabled a great deal of eclecticism in third-wave hegemony studies, with more cross-fertilization of ideas and a greater emphasis on dialogue.
Second, the rise of the “new hierarchy studies” served as an umbrella for a wide range of work explicitly on vertical stratification in international relations. Some rejected the “states-under-anarchy” framework and argued that international politics is a domain of complex authority relations—both formal and informal. Others developed richer understandings of the social dynamics of hierarchies—including with respect to norms, status competition, and the balance of influence between super- and subordinate actors.[17]
Third, the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath—especially the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq—produced an explosion of interest in empires and imperialism. The debate about “American Empire” was not always productive, but it did force international-relations scholars (eventually) to approach the conceptual relationship between “hegemony,” “informal empire,” and “empire” with a lot more analytical rigor than we previously had. Predictably, no consensus developed. But the debate pushed forward the “new hierarchy studies.” It also fed directly into “third wave” hegemony studies.
These three threads help explain why contemporary hegemonic-order theories are particularly interested in “how hegemonic orders operate in practice; how they produce opportunities and constraints for actors in world politics; the dynamics of power-political competition within and over order; and the mutually interdependent relationship between preeminent powers and the orders they create, sustain, and seek to alter.”[18] In this effort, scholars draw on a wide range of ways to theorize hegemony and international order. These include quantitative and qualitative network analysis, practice and field theory, theories of firm integration, organizational sociology, and discourse analysis and theories of identity.[19]
Contemporary hegemonic-order theories take much more seriously the difference between, on the one hand, hegemonic powers and, on the other hand, the international orders that they shape.[20] Even after system-wide wars, hegemons “cannot completely restructure international order.” The United States, Great Britain, Bourbon France, the Ming, the Qing, and the Umayyad Caliphate all emerged “in pre-existing” orders that profoundly shaped their ordering practices. Moreover, hegemonic powers “rarely, if ever, enjoy a sufficient preponderance” of power to completely rewrite the texture of international politics.[21]
Traditional hegemonic-order theories had trouble accommodating the possibility that hegemonic powers themselves might (at least outside of postwar settlements) seek to revise international order. Instead, they tended to treat opposition to a hegemonic power as per se revisionist. But the United States, for example, has arguably been the most revisionist state of the twenty-first century—even before Trump 2.0. The Global War on Terror saw the United States rewrite “the rules” of international politics, including through the doctrine of “preemption” that the Bush administration used to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq. It also made international order significantly more illiberal by, among other things, creating a precedent for denying basic rights to anyone labelled a “terrorist.”[22]
Contemporary hegemonic-order theories emphasize that international orders supply both means and mediums for influence, that they create and condition power politics. We saw this, at least to a limited degree, in the Gaza conflict. Those seeking to protect Palestinian noncombatants have successfully leveraged liberal institutions and norms to increase the political costs of Israeli policy, as well as U.S. support for Israel. Observers correctly argue that “liberal order” has failed to stop Israel’s targeting practices, its abuse of prisoners, or the pogroms launched by far-right religious settlers on the West Bank. But we also need to ask ourselves how the conflict would look, first, in absence of contemporary international humanitarian law and, second, with a great-power patron that faced no political costs from mass violence against noncombatants.
Standard definitions of “international order” stress rules, norms, and institutions of global governance. This reflects of a) the ways that structural functionalism—in which norms explain how social order persists—continues to shape our conceptions of order, b) the influence of English School theory in accounts of international order, and c) the emphasis that first-generation constructivists often placed on sociological institutionalism. At the same time, most scholars of international order agree that “order” is a shorthand for relative stabilities in patterns of interaction—a textbook definition of social structure.[23]
There is no consensus either with respect to how to define international order or where, if at all, to draw the line between “international structure” and “international order.” Many of the theoretical traditions represented in hegemony studies embrace distinctive ways of conceptualizing structure, including both in terms of “social networks” or “social fields.” But what they share is a tendency to disaggregate international order—hegemonic or otherwise. This is not just a matter of distinguishing between regional orders and global orders. It often involves exploring variation in international order across functional domains, in different status groups (such as, great powers, middle powers, and weaker states), and among types of actors.[24]
In Exit from Hegemony, Alex Cooley and I adopted a crude heuristic for dealing with the multiple dimensions of order. We distinguish between the “architecture” and “infrastructure” of international order. We use the former to refer to “design principles” (even if emergent and unplanned) such as rules and norms. We describe “infrastructure” as the practices, interactions, and relations that comprise the “stuff” of international order. In the case of U.S. hegemony, these range from joint military exercises to routine communication between midlevel officials in ministries of finance, to systems of financial flows.
One of the leitmotifs that runs through the book is that, like the Trump administration, we ignore “infrastructure” at our peril. For one thing, U.S. hegemony is built on an extensive network of ongoing diplomatic and military interactions. For another, much of “the action” in contemporary international order involves the creation of diplomatic, economic, and military ties that exclude the United States, especially by China. In our view, this is where most of the “action” is when it comes to the fate of international orders; by the time we get to explicit renegotiations of architecture, the infrastructure is usually already changed.
In that book, as well as a more recent edited volume, we emphasize that orders are also created and maintained by the provision of various goods: economic, security, cultural, and so forth.[25] Hegemonic-stability theory, for example, has long argued that hegemons provide public goods, supposedly including an open trading system. David Lake correctly notes that a lot of the goods provided by great powers are “private” rather than public; many are “club” goods.[26] Carla Norrlof emphasizes that the U.S. has leveraged those goods, including through threats of exclusion, in order to create a more favorable order for itself—including ensuring that the dollar would remain the global reserve currency after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.[27] What goods great powers provide, under what terms, to whom, and in what ways are not just a way of shaping order—they are a great deal of what we call order.[28]
A great deal of work on contemporary “order contestation” (the idea that orders are always negotiated and contested is pretty fundamental to third-wave hegemony studies) focuses on how power transitions change the opportunities and constraints for lower-tier powers. A big part of this is the rise of alternative providers of goods—development aid, security guarantees, and the like. These generate exit options for states that, heretofore, were dependent on the incumbent hegemon. This, in turn, increases their bargaining leverage and gives them the ability to “hedge” by diversifying their portfolio. Great power competition, all things being equal, means paying more to get less.[29]
But competitive international environments can also create incentives for the formation of informal and formal empire. One way that a great power can ensure control over its client is to de facto or de jure strip it of its capacity for autonomous foreign policy.[30] So third-wave hegemony studies emphasize contestation and negotiation over order. It takes a more expansive view of order and ordering processes (in fact, I have argued that we should be talking about “ordering” rather than “order”). It also, as I already noted, focuses on how the “stuff” of international order structures the opportunities and constraints faced by states—including hegemonic powers.
The Israel-Hamas war was itself embedded in a regional “conflict complex” that involves a number of different fault lines, most notably the divide between the now much-weakened “Axis of Resistance” and its opponents. These conflicts have a lot of different stakes, but one of them is most definitely regional (and even global) order. Meanwhile, the security order that Washington played a major role in shaping provides the United States with multiple vectors and instruments of influence. But it also constrains U.S. policy, as the Obama administration learned on multiple occasions (from the KSA’s crackdown in Bahrain to the complications created by its pursuit of the JCPOA).[31]
The role of Hamas and Hezbollah in the struggle over order in the Middle East harkens back to something that I noted earlier: traditional hegemonic-order theories completely ignore transnational and substate actors, even though both can play crucial roles in the politics of international order. This is not just a matter of “nuance.” Once we start taking nonstate actors seriously, it turns out that we have misunderstood classic cases of hegemony. For example, Habsburg Spain is perhaps the archetypal case of hegemonic overextension: of a preponderant power getting pulled into peripheral conflicts that it cannot afford to fight. But one of the chief causes of their “overextension” was not foreign wars per se but having to deal with uprising and rebellions. The most important of these, the Dutch Revolt, would have failed—and might not have happened at all—in the absence of the organizational infrastructure created by the Reformed Church and without substantial support from protestants outside of the Netherlands. In modern parlance, we are talking about “transnational religious networks.”[32] Any similarities with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq are completely coincidental.
Finally, the older literature on hegemonic orders almost completely ignores anticolonial movements, even though they drove arguably the single most important change in international order of the last century. More broadly, revisionist states don’t just fall from coconut trees. They often result when counter-order (revisionist) political movements take control of a government. Fascism and communism, the two great revisionist forces of the interwar period, began life as political movements with important transnational dimensions.
The Current Power Transition
Our tendency to focus on “unipolarity” occludes the degree that hegemony in the 1990s was essentially exercised by a great-power cartel, made up largely of members of the G7. By the later 1990s, the “liberal international order” rested on two large federations—the United States and the European Union—and their outsized economic power. Even if the U.S. was really the “indispensable nation,” that was only the case because practically every other great power in the world was deeply embedded in the American security system, anchored by NATO and the U.S.-Japan bilateral alliance. Most of those great powers could have formed the backbone of a counterbalancing coalition. Instead, they chose to remain part of an informal confederation led by the United States.[33]
What they also did was form a more or less united front on the provision of international goods, especially development assistance. While their regulatory regimes, internationalized via their market power, differed in many ways, the U.S. and its allies generally committed themselves to fostering an open international economy. In consequence, the “liberal international order” was, more or less, the only game in town. Governments looking for economic goods, credible security guarantees, or even seeking to improve their international standing had little choice but to accept “western” conditions and expectations. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the “triumph” of market democracy also, for a time, lent substantial prestige to the “liberal international order.”
None of this meant that the G7 cartel always got what it wanted. States with highly specific assets could still escape much of this pressure. This was true of some of the most important players in the Middle East, who benefited from some combination of large petroleum reserves and, for example, U.S. national security priorities. Oil wealth also positioned states in the region—namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and, with some caveats, Iran—among the few sources of alternative international patronage. And while the Gulf States sometimes provided assistance to forces hostile to the United States—and supported rival sides in conflicts—they also chose to remain within the U.S. alliance system rather than to balance against it.
The ‘western’ patronage quasi-monopoly was never going to last. The idea, as noted above, was to shape rising powers such that they would eventually become sources of liberal ordering in their own right. Instead, many of them developed strategies and tactics for resisting liberalizing forces; they learned how to turn digital communications technologies to their advantage. They now use these strategies to undermine western democracies. Other authoritarian regimes and aspiring autocrats borrow — or outright purchase — their playbook. And, of course, firms in the United States, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere are more than happy to grab a share of the domestic repression market.[34]
The overwhelming consensus in Washington policy circles is that “enlargement” was on balance a failure. Over the last fifteen years, China has become more, not less, authoritarian. Russia is no longer a democracy, and it seeks to actively undermine liberal democracy overseas. The G7’s share of global GDP has fallen dramatically, while China—and to a lesser extent Russia—has broken the ‘western’ patronage monopoly. Small powers can now diversify their ‘international goods’ portfolios, play different patrons against one another, or even exit from ‘western order’ altogether. Meanwhile, many countries, including the United States, have birthed counter-order movements. Many commentators believe that the rise of reactionary populism is a direct response to the ‘excesses’ of liberal order, especially to the “neoliberal” variety that became dominant in the 1990s. Others stress the role of status insecurity rooted in, or at least exacerbated by, relative decline. Regardless, a counter-order movement now controls the government of the incumbent hegemon.[35]
The Gaza conflict, which has destabilized, and killed tens of thousands in the Levant, occurred in a context of a broader crisis of liberal international order (which is mirrored by a crisis of democracy within Israel and in the United States). It has possibly accelerated that crisis: to the extent that it affected the outcome of the 2024 U.S. election, appears to have given Netanyahu a new lease on life, resulted in a crippling blow to Palestinian self-determination, and convinced many of the hollowness of liberal order. There might be a bitter irony in that. The Oslo Accords represented the apex of the U.S. post-Cold War liberal project in the United States (Iraq was a very different kind of “liberal” project). The Biden administration hoped to resurrect the accords, just as it hoped to restore liberal order. Instead, it midwifed the likely end of both.
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[1] Lee 2025
[2] Scott 2025
[3] Shalal 2025
[4] see Pramanik and Seim 2023; Regilme and Hodzi 2021; “International Development Aid – European Commission,” n.d.
[5] Cooley and Nexon 2020; Clark 2009; Farrell and Newman 2019b; Gibbons 2016; Ikenberry 2011; 2004; Miller 2016; Norrlof 2010; Norrlof et al. 2020; Nye 2019; Oatley et al. 2013; Oatley 2015; Rapp-Hooper 2020; Winecoff 2020
[6] for various perspectives, see Acharya, Estevadeordal, and Goodman 2023; Alcaro 2018; Cooley and Nexon 2020; Flockhart 2016; Herolf 2011; Posen 2009
[7] Beauchamp 2018
[8] Farrell and Newman 2019b; 2019a; Cooley and Nexon 2025
[9] Solnit 2025
[10] see Bourdieu 1986; see also Adler-Nissen 2012
[11] Goddard and Nexon 2016; Goddard, MacDonald, and Nexon 2019
[12] Ward 2017
[13] Allison 2017
[14] Astute readers will already be understandably upset with my lack of a discussion of neo-Gramscian and other Marxist-inflected accounts of hegemony. This is just a matter of space. For brief discussions, see Ikenberry and Nexon 2019
[15] see Ikenberry and Nexon 2019.
[16] Ikenberry 2001
[17] Mattern and Zarakol 2016
[18] Ikenberry and Nexon 2019, 397–98; see, for example, Bettiza and Lewis 2020; Chan et al. 2021; Dezalay and Garth 2010; Daßler, Kruck, and Zangl 2019; Drezner 2019; Goh 2013; Heimann et al. 2024; Kruck and Zangl 2019; Norrlof 2018
[19] Ikenberry and Nexon 2019, 397–98; for social fields, see Banks 2019; Go 2008; McCourt 2021; Oskanian 2023; for networks, see Goddard 2018; Izumikawa 2020; MacDonald 2014; for theories of firm integration, see Cooley 2005; for discourse and identity see Lake 1999; Hopf 2013; 2013; Murray 2018; Ward 2017
[20] see Goddard 2008; 2018; Mukherjee 2019.
[21] Nexon and Neumann 2018, 662.
[22] Cooley, Nexon, and Ward 2019; Cooley and Nexon 2021; 2025; Chan et al. 2021.
[23] see Lascurettes and Poznansky 2021; see also Goddard 2018; Cooley and Nexon 2020; Tang 2016.
[24] see Barder 2015; J. Colgan 2021; J. D. Colgan and Miller 2019; Jones 2008; Lascurettes and Poznansky 2021; Towns 2009
[25] Andersen, Cooley, and Nexon 2021
[26] Lake 2009
[27] Norrlof 2010; see also Norrlof et al. 2020; Norrlof 2014
[28] Cooley, Nexon, and Ward 2019
[29] see Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2016; Dunning 2004; Woods 2008
[30] Lake 1996; MacDonald 2009a; 2009b
[31] Indeed, if I understand correctly, Israel is facing serious munitions shortages. Those shortages will continue as long it continues operations in Gaza. But those shortages also threaten regional deterrence, and thus put pressure on the Biden administration to continue supplying weaponry.
[32] Nexon 2009
[33] compare Ikenberry 2001; 2011
[34] see, for example, Cooley 2019; 2015; Cooley and Nexon 2021; Farrell and Newman 2021
[35] see Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2021.