Lovely superpower - huntington

The Lonely Superpower
Samuel P. Huntington

THE NEW DIMENSION OF POWER

past decade global politics has changed flindamentally in two ways. First, it has been substantially reconfigured along cultural and civihzational lines, as I bave highlighted in the pages of this journal and documented at length in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Second, as argued in that book, global politics is also always about power and the struggle for power, and today international relations is changing along that crucial dimension. Tbe global structure of power in the Cold War was basically bipolar; tbe emerging structure is very different. There is now only one superpower. But that does not mean that the world is unipolar. A unipolar system would have one superpower, no significant major powers, and many minor powers. As a result, the superpower could effectively resolve important international issues alone, and no combination of otber states would have the power to prevent it from doing so. For several centuries the classical world under Rome, and at times East Asia under China, approximated this model. A bipolar system like the Cold War has two superpowers, and the relations between tbem are central to international politics. Each superpower dominates a coalition of allied states and competes with the other superpower for influence among nonaligned countries. A multipolar system has several major powers of comparable strength that cooperate and compete with each other in shifting patterns. A coalition
DURING THE
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

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Samuel p. Huntington of major states is necessary to resolve important international issues. European politics approximated this model for several centuries. Contemporary international