Abstract
This chapter revisits Birthe Hansen’s ‘Unipolarity and World Politics’ (2011) to re-evaluate Hansen’s proposed relationship between the United States as a unipole and the political project(s) of post-Cold War US administrations. The drafted but unrealized 1992 Defense Planning Guidance for American unipolarity developed during the Bush Sr. administration serves as a ‘maximization strategy’ against which political projects from the Clinton to the Trump administrations are examined. It is shown that consecutive American management of the delta of unipolarity through political projects pursuing a globalized liberal world order has resulted in misalignment between the objective of maintaining a ‘single option’ system and a world order conducive to this goal. The chapter identifies four distinct political projects: Clinton's globalization as economics, Bush's globalization as Westernization, Obama's globalization as multilateralism and Trump's anti-globalization as patriotism and it concludes on the misalignment of each in regard to the American world order.
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Jakobsson, A.K. (2022). Managing the Delta of Unipolarity: Post-Cold War Misalignment of American Political Projects and World Order from DPG92 to Trump. In: Græger, N., Heurlin, B., Wæver, O., Wivel, A. (eds) Polarity in International Relations. Governance, Security and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05505-8_11
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