American International Journal of Social Science

The Dangers of Hegemonic Decline: The Rising Costs of Military Maintenance
Kathleen C Schwartzman

Abstract
American foreign policy is in the midst of a fundamental about-turn. After decades of promoting global integration, the opening of China, and the reliance of American producers and consumers on trade with China, the current policies foster delinking. A plethora of recent scholarship has explored the delinking phenomenon. In this essay, I suggest that to best contextualize this phenomenon, we should employ a world-historical approach which merges the world-systems paradigm with the political sociology analysis of U.S. post-WWII foreign policy. In short, the fraying of the post-WWII establishment of the ‗Grand Area‘ is part of the crumbling U.S. hegemony and there are new perils associated with attempts to fortify it and/or to create a new Grand Area.

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