International Hegemony Meets Domestic Politics: Why Liberals can be Pessimists

Many theories of hegemonic orders assume that systemic incentives will discipline the hegemon to maintain a status quo policy supporting that order. These theories make too strong a claim that domestic actors will not see any self-interested gain in opposing hegemony or strategies necessary for hegemony. Yet policies sustaining hegemony are unlikely to remain perpetually exempt from domestic political contestation. Indeed, US political institutions—especially political parties—may provide incentives for actors to undermine hegemony in order to reward their core constituencies or to distinguish their electoral brand from a rival party. Whether by producing overt policy shocks, through diminished expectations of gains from future cooperation by other states, or some combination of the two, these processes can erode the foundations of hegemonic order. This threat to international order has been illustrated by the 2016 US election, but the conditions that produced that result were present long before and would have persisted regardless of the outcome.