The puzzle persists: Why is the world not "ganging up" against the "last remaining superpower"? Why has history not claimed its due a dozen years after the end of the Cold War, the twentieth century's last and longest dominant conflict? For history (and theory) asserts that the international system abhors imbalances, that great power will spawn counter-power. At this point, the United States is the mightiest nation on earth. Its reach spans the globe. Its economy dwarfs the next-largest, Japan, by a factor of two and a half; its defense outlays exceed those of the next five-biggest spenders combined. Nor is it just a matter of "hard power." America's "soft power", to invoke Joseph S. Nye's term, looms even larger than its economic and military assets. U.S. culture, low-brow or high, radiates outward with an intensity last seen in the days of the Roman Empire--but with a novel twist. Rome's and Soviet Russia's cultural sway stopped exactly at their military borders. America's soft power, though, rules over an empire on which the sun never sets.
Yet history (still) refuses to kick in against Number 1. The Soviet Union's demise in 1989-91 has not produced the expected outcome. There is no "reversal of alliances" as after World War II, when the United States inducted defeated Germany and Japan into its anti-Soviet coalition. Nor has America's Cold War coalition crumpled, as history would have suggested. The alliance against Revolutionary France was essentially dead by 1822, seven years after Waterloo. The anti-German alliance of World War I began to unravel in Rapallo in 1922, three years after Versailles. But twelve years after the Soviet capitulation in the Cold War, there is not even a trace of real, that is, military, balancing against the United States. No armed coalitions, formal or informal, are being organized by former friends or foes.
