The American Hegemony Project, According to Adam Tooze

Historian Adam Tooze helps the world, but especially American leaders, to abandon the ambition of world hegemon. He shows the USA the way to avoid the Thucydides Trap. The trap is a mirage created by bad history that imagines the history of all hitherto international societies as the history of the struggle between hegemon and challenger.

This way of thinking projects the unique historical experience of the post-1945 or post-1991 world back into past times. It does not heed a basic lesson of good history. Events change the meaning of our basic concepts, even in the world of international politics. An empire in 2025 is not the same as an empire in 1776 or 1914 or 250 CE. Globalization in the age of steam metamorphosed in the age of the web, and is changing its costume again in the age of the BRICS. Even the idea of history itself can change, sometimes suddenly, while history changes us.

Both Adam Tooze and John Darwin reckon with these phase shifts in historical processes, such as economy and culture, and in the mental categories of power politics, such as ‘great power’ and ‘hegemony’ or indeed ‘Western civilization’. If, as Virginia Woolf believed, human character changed in 1910, then during the period between 1880 and 1910, the character of that sliver of humanity who are actors, not spectators, of ‘great power politics’ also changed fundamentally.

Without understanding these changes, which form the backdrop to Tooze’s work, we cannot understand today’s crisis of American Primacy and America’s new role in world history.