Some have suggested a system of regional hegemons: the United States in North America, Brazil in South America, Germany in Europe, Russia in Eurasia, China in Asia and so on. The problem with this scenario is that it implies equality among hegemons where none exists. It also assumes that these hegemons are themselves stable, which they often are not. Brazil has profound institutional problems and social unrest. Russia will not dominate energy markets as much in the future, even as its own population declines. Germany is too entrapped in the Russian economy and energy sector to maintain a forceful foreign policy. China sits atop a vast credit bubble, which is only one of its structural and economic challenges. The United States has its problems, to be sure: partisan gridlock, a broken health care sector, increasing disparity between the poor and wealthy and so forth. But the problems that burden the other hegemons are in a number of cases worse and far more fundamental.
In other words, some of the hegemons themselves may severely stumble in the coming years, for Russia and China both may undergo significant social unrest. It is more likely that post-Putin Russia will be more anarchic than democratic; the same goes for China, if the Communist Party there fundamentally weakens.
And while the United States may be, in a relative sense, the strongest of the hegemons for many years to come, its ability to intervene in world crises may, nevertheless, diminish. American power depends on capable central authority elsewhere -- for where else can an American president apply pressure except upon other rulers? But if central authority itself gives way to weak democracies and anarchy where nobody is really in charge, there will be no address where America can go to demand action. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the American people are simply more hesitant to underwrite security in distant theaters than they were during the Cold War, when they saw themselves in an existential battle against a rival ideology.
Policy elites have no trouble imagining a world of rival hegemons to replace an American imperial-like system -- because even a world of rival hegemons implies some degree of recognizable order and organization. What they have a more difficult time imagining is a world in which nobody is sufficiently in charge anywhere, where formlessness rules, where hierarchy itself has decayed. This anarchic formlessness combined with postmodern technology may help define the world that ultimately awaits us.
