The United States National Intelligence Council has just issued its latest global trends report. The document attempts to envisage the state of the world in 2025 and to consider how the international relations of the future will affect the US. The most significant finding of this latest report is that American power is undoubtedly on the wane. Whilst the country that Niall Ferguson called ‘Colossus’ will remain the most significant national actor on the international arena, it will be less dominant in future, according to the report.

Independent analysts and researchers have long argued that American hegemony has been in decline since the so-called ‘Nixon shock’ of 1971, when the Bretton Woods exchange rate system was abruptly abandoned. At the same time, the rise of Japan and the East Asian tigers threatened US industry, while the ascent of China challenged American geopolitical preponderance. Given that US decline has fascinated scholars for years, the Council’s conclusion is no surprise in itself. On the other hand, it is interesting that the American state is finally conceding that the American empire is in decline. The implications of the change in attitudes that this report demonstrates will be wide-ranging and significant.

Global Trends 2025 is, above all, a document firmly embedded in the realist school of international relations. Its concerns surround the relationships between nation-states and it tends to present these in hierarchical terms. The role of the US as the hegemonic power is, naturally enough, the main focus. Its various contributors have therefore concluded that:

‘By 2025 the US will find itself as one of a number of important actors, albeit still the most powerful one, on the world stage. Even in the military realm, where the US will continue to possess considerable advantages in 2025, advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and nonstate actors, proliferation of long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks increasingly will constrict US freedom of action.’

A power thus constrained is clearly no longer in possession of hegemonic status. Current events also indicate a decline is US power and prestige. The ongoing crisis of the financial system presents itself as an acute reminder of the vulnerability of the US in the light of global capital flows. Notably, crisis talks on this matter have included the G20 rather than the G8, as would have previously been the case. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick has argued for a ‘new multilateralism’, suggesting that:

‘We should consider a new steering group including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the current G-7, that holds regular formal and informal dialogues. The group should not just replace the G-7 with a fixed-number G-14, and should evolve to fit changing circumstances. We need this new network so that global problems are not just mopped up after the fact, but anticipated.’

It would seem that it is no longer enough for the US to take command of the situation - a truly global response is now necessary. This must be interpreted as evidence that a new age of multipolarity is in the ascendance. After the post-9/11 years of the Bush Doctrine and the expenditure of much international political capital and goodwill on the ‘War on Terror’, the way is now open for Barack Obama to shape a new role for the United States. Indeed, it is encouraging that President-Elect Obama has consistently demonstrated a rhetorical and ideological tendency to multilateralism that more appropriately reflects the changed conditions of America’s place in the world.

Consider also that more and more countries are holding their national reserves in currencies other than the dollar. Similarly, it is reported that, from the supermodel Giselle to the Iranian government, there is an increasing demand that international business be carried out in euros or yen, rather than the traditional global currency: the greenback. What more profound measure could there be of the decline of American prestige - what Joseph Nye famously called ‘soft power’?

Previous reports issued by the National Intelligence Council have acknowledged the rise of foreign powers and it was never asserted that America did - or should - rule the world. Yet this latest statement goes much further and is unique in that it seems to suggest that the US is no longer even the world leader, merely one leading country among several.

In reality, talk of superpowers and world leaders is looking increasingly outdated at any rate. The Global Trends report argues that the international community as we know it will no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Similarly, disaggregated civil society, criminal and terrorist groups will have much more power. In short, without the US as hegemon, the prognosis is one of an international environment in which life is - in a Hobbesian sense - nasty, brutish and short.

This state of affairs would begin to look somewhat like the ‘new medievalism’ outlined by writers such as Hedley Bull. To expand on this prognosis, it is suggested that traditional Westphalian sovereignty and international order may be increasingly destabilised by the irresistible forces of globalisation, whilst the state itself is simultaneously undermined and overwhelmed by forces beyond its control. New forms of agency will emerge alongside the state, enveloping it and overlapping in increasingly complex patterns of quasi-anarchical governance.

All the same, looking back over the past sixty years, it is hard to deny that the US hegemon has done much good for the world. The causes of liberty and democracy have - on balance - been greatly furthered by the global leadership of the United States. Similarly, despite the valid criticisms that can be marshalled against US trade policy, free trade has benefited ordinary people the world over, in large part due to America’s long-standing ideological commitment to trade liberalisation. In line with many theories of hegemony, the US has been a stabilising force and guarantor of a liberal international economic order that has - broadly - ensured a more peaceful world system.

But lest this article begin to sound like a romantic exercise in nostalgia, we should remember that power tends to corrupt and the absolute power of a hegemon tends to corrupt absolutely. Few will need convincing that due to its overweening dominance, the United States has attracted a great deal of hostility. It is not hard to see how anger at its military presence in the Middle East, along with growing inequalities between the developed and developing worlds have led some to conflate both the excesses of the US as well as its more positive attributes in an aggressive condemnation of all that America stands for.

Theoretical insights can aid our analysis here. Realist views of hegemony have tended to focus on the way in which great powers provide global public goods, such as the liberal economic order discussed above. (Unfortunately, for the authors of Global Trends 2025, the continuation of the free trade agenda is now an ‘uncertainty’.) More critical approaches often argue that hegemony is an inherently oppressive phenomenon. Others have distinguished between benign hegemony and selfish hegemony.

I would therefore submit that the US has passed through a period of benign hegemony, in which it provided the collective goods - such as the UN and WTO - that characterise the international system 30 July, 2010. As a declining hegemon, it has now moved into a stage of selfish and destructive hegemony, in which it acts more than ever in an exploitative manner. These are the death throes of the ‘New American Century’.

Of course, predicting the future is fraught with dangers and many analysts have been made to look very foolish in retrospect. After all, how many international relations scholars foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall? Nonetheless, it seems fair to conclude that the era of liberal triumphalism, a la Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ is at a close. America’s global manifest destiny is suddenly looking rather directionless. In reality, it is a project of counterhegemony that is most clearly at work in the international sphere 30 July, 2010. This can be seen in phenomena as diverse as global terrorism, Chinese diplomatic machinations, a Russian resurgence, and the growing alter-globalisation movement.

But will this counterhegemonic moment result in the multipolar conflict suggested by the National Intelligence Council’s assessment? It is surely in US interests to present hegemonic decline as leading inexorably to violence and instability. Need this be the case? The report concedes that multipolarity and a nascent global civil society could strengthen the international system, plugging holes in ‘ageing’ postwar institutions. This is hardly a bold or ambitious statement for the future, but it may be an accurate evaluation all the same.

As I have suggested above, there is nothing surprising per se to be found in the views expressed in Global Trends 2025. What is surprising is that it is the US government that is expressing them. Perhaps admitting the decline in American power is a way of lowering the burden of high expectations and weighty responsibilities. Alternatively, this may be a key turning point in the process of counterhegemony.

If, by 2025, the selfish hegemony of the United States is replaced by a period of multipolarity followed by a new selfish Chinese hegemony, the world will be in a position no better - and probably a good deal worse - than it is in 30 July, 2010. However, if global civil society is able to mobilise enough political will, the twilight of American dominance can be understood as a rare opportunity to reshape for the better the way that the world is governed.

Andrew Pickering is a postgraduate student of International Political Economy at the University of Sheffield. He writes at http://davostoseattle.wordpress.com