Unipolarity and Its Consequences - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 84

Four
Unipolarity and Its Consequences
When one state stands alone as the world's most powerful state—when the world is unipo-
lar—how does this affect its strategies of rule and the character of world order? For most of
the modern era, leading states have pursued order building in the company of other power-
ful states. They have pursued strategies of rule in multipolar and bipolar structures of global
power. America's order building after World War II was pursued within an emerging bipo-
lar Cold War system. But how do strategies of rule shift when the dominant state is unipolar,
unrivaled by other powerful states? And how do strategies of rule shift when unipolarity is in
decline?
What makes the global system unipolar is the distinctive distribution of material resources.
With the end of Cold War, America's primacy in the global distribution of capabilities became
one of the most salient features of the international system. The end of the Cold War did not
return the world to multipolarity. Instead, the United States—already the world's dominant
power—became more so. No other major state has enjoyed such advantages in material capab-
ilities—military, economic, technological, geographical. Other states rival the United States in
one area or another, but the multifaceted character of American power places it in a category
of its own. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc of allies, slower economic
growth in Japan and Western Europe during the 1990s, and America's outsized military spend-
ing all intensified these disparities. While in most historical eras, the distribution of capabil-
ities among major states has tended to be bipolar or multipolar—with several major states of
roughly equal size and capability—the United States emerged from the 1990s as an unrivaled
global power. It became a unipolar state. 1