The U.S. ceased to be the bearer of democracy and broke the international rules it actually created with the formation of the United Nations. It lost many of its allies along the road and, in the last 7 years, the powers around it, like the Russian Federation, China, India or the EU have begun to grow in power and significance. The financial and economic crisis represents one of the most important moments of recent history of international relations because it produced massive changes in the overall relations of the international arena. While at the beginning of 2003, the United States broke the balance of power and acted against UN regulations and invaded Iraq on what was proved later on as false reasons, the end of 2010 sees a different U.S. looking for cooperation rather than dissent, for a cooperative leadership rather than total hegemony. It appears that the international actors did not necessarily limited the powers of the U.S., but this came more from within the country, dealing with internal economic and also political turmoil. This change is still slow and until a new balance of power is clearly established, the United State still remains the most important actor on the international arena.
If discussing reasons for which the U.S. could not be stopped in its unilateral invasion of Iraq one of the most important ones was that there was no clear, powerful and willing to go to the end voice in the international arena. As stakes are sensibly higher with Iran or North Korea, the U.S. cannot act again in an unilateral way due to the higher risk of colliding with China or the Russian Federation. Also, one should not forget that one of...
unipolarism would be that the international community is making efforts to preserve the current multipolarism, as fragile as it is. Yet, even this theory has many holes in it. The world is in an obvious transition towards something that it has not seen before. Debates about the failure of capitalism, currency wars, cyber wars, Muslim world democratization, globalization open a new world for the study of international relations in which the system looks like an interdependent competition in which all actors are more or less dependent on each other whilst looking for solutions to become more and more independent through new technologies, resources and capital formation. Another flaw of the balance of power theory is that there is no one single power acting coherently to move the United States from its position. Having so many center of power, regional or emerging global, like China, the EU and the Russian Federation, the United States is bound to enter into a world of interdependent multipolar creation of the financial crisis and the rise of powers. and, if these could be considered the international community, then these would become the weights for passing from the unipolar American world of the 90s and beginning of 2000s, through the interdependence of resources and finance of today, towards a new world.
Bibliography
Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics. McGraw-Hill
