On the loss of American hegemony > Surely this is nonsense > But it is not harmless nonsense.

by Charles Krauthammer at The Wall Street Journal

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lecture, delivered last week in New York:

Henry Kissinger once noted that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power.

Well, hegemony is out. As Obama said in his General Assembly address, "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." (The "can" in that declaration is priceless.) And if hegemony is out, so is balance of power: "No balance of power among nations will hold."
The president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others—which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20, and the Western alliance. And just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced "alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" as "making no sense in an interconnected world."

What does that say about NATO? Of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? Or even of the European Union?

Surely this is nonsense. But it is not harmless nonsense. It's nonsense with a point. It reflects a fundamental view that the only legitimate authority in the international system is that which emanates from the "community of nations" as a whole. Which means, I suppose, acting through its most universal organs such as, again I suppose, the U.N. and its various agencies. . . .

To be sure, the idea of the international community acting through the U.N.—a fiction and a farce respectively—as enforcer of norms and maintainer of stability is absurd. . . .

But whatever bizarre form of multilateral or universal structures are envisioned for keeping world order, certainly hegemony—and specifically American hegemony—is to be retired.