Opinion: US hegemony is coming to an end
Military expert Igor Chibisov speculates on whether the US will maintain their dominant military-political position in the world and the status of ‘a world gendarme’ against the current ‘militaristic background’
“After the end of the Cold War, the United States cut the network of its military bases (there are more than a thousand of them at present), but expanded the geography of the American military presence. After WWII, the world was divided into two superpowers: the USSR and the US. Meanwhile, after the USSR collapse in 1991, the former world order – based on the opposition of the Warsaw Pact and the NATO bloc – also sank into oblivion. Accordingly, the US then turned out to be the only global centre of power. That victory of the United States and the hegemony of the collective West led to a triumph of liberal democracy and globalisation. In the early 1990s, many Warsaw Pact countries, as well as the former Soviet republics – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – chose that path. The US assumed the role of a world arbiter or a gendarme, depending on the situation. However, thirty years have passed since then, and China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkiye and some other countries – not inferior to the Western world in terms of economy, population and defence power – have entered the international arena. The unipolar world order, which seemed stable, is obviously collapsing now,” the expert noted.
According to Mr. Chibisov, the United States and its allies are finding it increasingly difficult to control world politics. “A global balance of power is changing rapidly, and we do not know what the world of the future will be like. However, one thing is clear: the US hegemony is coming to its end. This was confirmed by the Americans’ counterproductive military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and now in Ukraine,” he said.
