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IMHO since 9/11, the situation is going downwards. just because we have potential for more destruction than there is currently being done, I wouldn't call it a

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  I think the situation has been generally going downward since the decline of the Soviet Union as a global power and its subsequent fall (I don't think that contradicts the core of hegemonic stability theory, really: late in the Soviet Era, the superpower conflict was less of a source of conflict than it had been earlier in the Cold War, and both the US and the USSR were exerting stabilizing influences in their respective spheres of influence -- since then the US has become unrivaled, but its expanding influence hasn't been enough to replace the influence of the USSR.) If you look at a lot of the big conflict regions since then, they are often places that had conflicts under the surface that were contained either specifically by Soviet influence, or by the combination of Soviet and US influence because, while both may have sought to exploit opportunities from the bubbling conflicts, neither really was prepared to accept the risk of a major conflict getting out of control where they might lose key interests, and neither had enough local influence and power to be confident of attaining a positive outcome. But the US's level of global influence through hard power -- maintained by military spending on par with the rest of the world combined -- is probably unsustainable, for much the same reason that the Soviet empire was (the US just started the hard-power spending war that was the Cold War from a much better starting point, and was able to carry it out longer.)