AMERICAN HEGEMONY IN TRANSITION: COERCIVE DIPLOMACY, MILITARY ADVENTURISM, AND THE RESHAPING OF MIDDLE EAST ORDER

УДК 327.8

Abstract

This article examines the trajectory of American foreign policy under the presidency of Donald Trump as a case study in what scholars of international relations have theorised as coercive hegemony. Drawing on the frameworks of offensive realism and postcolonial critique, it argues that contemporary American conduct — encompassing unilateral military action, extraterritorial coercion, and the systematic marginalisation of multilateral institutions — echoes earlier patterns of Western imperial expansion while operating through distinctly twenty-first-century mechanisms. The article pays particular attention to escalating tensions in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, analysing the strategic, economic, and geopolitical consequences of confrontational postures toward Iran, and the ways in which these postures are reshaping regional alignments. It further interrogates the apparent fracturing of the Atlantic alliance and the implications this carries for global governance. The analysis concludes that the period under review may mark a structural inflection point in the post-Cold War international order.

Аннотация

В данной статье рассматривается внешнеполитический курс США в период президентства Дональда Трампа как пример того, что исследователи в области международных отношений определяют как принудительную гегемонию. Опираясь на концепции наступательного реализма и постколониальной критики, автор утверждает, что современное поведение Соединённых Штатов — включая односторонние военные действия, экстерриториальное принуждение и систематическое ослабление многосторонних институтов — воспроизводит более ранние модели западного империального расширения, действуя при этом посредством характерно новых механизмов XXI века. Особое внимание уделяется обострению напряжённости на Ближнем Востоке и в зоне Персидского залива. Анализируются стратегические, экономические и геополитические последствия конфронтационной политики в отношении Ирана.

Keywords: American foreign policy, Middle East geopolitics, coercive hegemony, international order

Ключевые слова: внешняя политика США, геополитика Ближнего Востока, принудительная гегемония, международный порядок

Introduction

1. The Return of Piratical Logic in International Affairs

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries witnessed European maritime expansion from Iberian ports that permanently altered the structure of global trade, territorial sovereignty, and the distribution of human suffering. Portuguese caravels rounded the Cape of Good Hope; Spanish galleons crossed the Atlantic. Behind each voyage lay a combination of economic appetite, theological justification, and the brute readiness to deploy violence against peoples who lacked the organisational or military capacity to resist. The machinery of colonialism, as numerous historians have documented, was inseparable from what contemporaries themselves sometimes called piracy — the seizure of resources and territories under the colour of authority, with the thinnest of legal or moral pretexts (Abernethy, 2000, p. 18).

The argument of this article is not that the United States of the early twenty-first century is straightforwardly a colonial power in the nineteenth-century sense. That would be too blunt an instrument of analysis. Rather, the claim is more specific: that certain features of American statecraft under the Trump administration — its preference for unilateral action, its instrumental relationship with international law, its willingness to deploy or threaten overwhelming military force to extract economic concessions — bear a structural resemblance to older patterns of coercive domination that deserve to be named and analysed rather than obscured by the euphemistic vocabulary of "security interests" and "rules-based order."

What follows is a political commentary in the scholarly tradition, informed by the theoretical frameworks that have emerged from offensive realism, world-systems theory, and postcolonial international relations. It draws on a range of secondary sources and analytical literature, including contributions from Russian international relations scholarship that has, in some respects, offered more systematic critiques of American unilateralism than has been common in the mainstream Anglophone academy.

2. Theoretical Framework: Offensive Realism and the Imperatives of Hegemonic Maintenance

Any serious analysis of American foreign policy behaviour requires a theoretical anchor. The most useful starting point, despite its limitations, remains John Mearsheimer's offensive realism, which holds that great powers in an anarchic international system are structurally compelled to seek regional hegemony and to prevent the emergence of rival hegemonies elsewhere (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 34). On this reading, what might appear from the outside as gratuitous aggression is better understood as the rational — if often brutal — logic of power maximisation in a competitive state system.

Yet offensive realism alone is insufficient, because it cannot easily account for the ideological dimensions of American exceptionalism, or for the ways in which domestic political configurations shape the specific form that hegemonic behaviour takes. Walt's work on alliance formation and the origins of alliances provides a complementary lens, drawing attention to how states balance against perceived threats rather than against power per se, and how miscalculation of others' threat perceptions can produce catastrophically counterproductive outcomes (Walt, 1987, p. 263). The Trump administration's approach to Iran, as will be argued below, offers a case study in exactly this kind of miscalculation.

Russian international relations scholarship has, for its part, contributed a body of critical analysis of American unipolarity that deserves wider engagement in the English-language literature. Scholars associated with IMEMO RAN (Institute of World Economy and International Relations) have argued that the post-Cold War "unipolar moment" was structurally unstable from its inception, and that American attempts to perpetuate it through military force were likely to accelerate rather than forestall the transition to multipolarity (Богатуров, 2003, с. 27). This perspective has gained considerable empirical traction in recent years. The journal Международные процессы has similarly carried important work on the erosion of international legal norms under conditions of American preponderance (Лебедева, 2010, с. 44).

A third framework, drawn from postcolonial theory, insists on naming the continuities between contemporary American practice and the longer history of Western imperialism. Chomsky's extensive documentation of what he calls the "Fifth Freedom" — the freedom to rob and exploit — places current American conduct within a historical sequence stretching back to the very maritime expansion with which this article began (Chomsky, 2003, p. 8). This framing is uncomfortable for many scholars trained in the realist tradition, but it is analytically indispensable if one wishes to understand not only what American policy does but why it takes the particular rhetorical and institutional forms it does.

3. Historical Analogies and the Grammar of Imperial Justification

One of the most striking features of the Trump administration's international conduct has been its reliance on a grammar of justification that would have been recognisable to the architects of European colonial expansion. The pretext of civilisational threat, the imperative of resource access, the instrumentalisation of legalistic language, and the selective invocation of humanitarian principles — all of these have appeared, in varying combinations, in American foreign policy statements concerning Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, and, most consequentially, Iran.

The comparison to Hitler's pretextual justifications for the annexation of the Sudetenland, the Anschluss, and the demand for the Danzig corridor, which the original text invokes, is polemically charged but analytically interesting. The mechanism in each case is similar: a powerful state identifies a weaker one as a threat (or as a site of legitimate territorial or economic claims), manufactures or exaggerates evidence for that threat, deploys it to justify actions that violate the prevailing normative framework, and relies on the unwillingness or incapacity of other states to mount effective resistance. The difference, of course, is one of context and scale; but the structural grammar of imperial justification has a remarkable persistence across time and regime type.

Historically, Latin America has served as the proving ground for precisely this kind of American conduct. From the Monroe Doctrine to the numerous interventions of the twentieth century, the region has been treated as a sphere of influence in which sovereignty is conditional and where Washington reserves the right to act unilaterally when its interests are perceived to be at stake (Smith, 2000, p. 91). The apparent extension of this logic to Venezuela in the period under review — and the broader signals it sends to other states that might be next — has to be understood against this historical backdrop, not as an aberration but as a continuation.

4. The Middle East Dimension: Iran, the Gulf, and the Unintended Consequences of Confrontation

Nowhere has the coercive logic of American hegemonic maintenance been more consequential, or more strategically ambiguous in its outcomes, than in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been subject to American sanctions for over four decades — a duration that, as the original text correctly notes, has neither produced the desired regime change nor eliminated Iranian capacity for regional influence. What prolonged economic warfare has arguably produced, instead, is the consolidation of a siege mentality within Iranian political culture, the deepening of economic ties with China and Russia, and the development of asymmetric military capabilities that complicate any straightforward calculus of American military superiority (Takeyh, 2006, p. 154).

The question of Iranian nuclear ambitions sits at the heart of this confrontation, and it is a question that admits of no easy answers. The American position — that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons — is not without strategic logic. A nuclear-armed Iran would alter the regional balance of power in ways that most Gulf states, as well as Israel, would find deeply threatening. But the means chosen to pursue this objective — unilateral military threats, maximum economic pressure, and the systematic destruction of diplomatic frameworks that might have provided a path to managed coexistence — have, by most assessments, strengthened rather than weakened the political constituency within Iran that regards nuclear deterrence as the only reliable guarantee of national survival (Fitzpatrick, 2011, p. 7).

Any military confrontation in the Persian Gulf region carries consequences that extend far beyond the immediate parties. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial portion of global oil trade passes, is an irreplaceable chokepoint in the global energy architecture. Disruption of traffic through the strait — whether through Iranian action in response to military attack, or through the general breakdown of maritime security that conflict would produce — would send energy prices to levels not seen in recent decades, with disproportionate impact on European and Asian economies that depend on Gulf energy exports. Russian analysts at IMEMO have modelled precisely these scenarios, noting the paradoxical ways in which Middle East instability tends to benefit Russian energy exporters while imposing severe costs on American allies in Europe and Asia (Примаков, 1999, с. 178).

The regional dimensions of any Iran conflict are similarly complex. Hezbollah's military capabilities have grown substantially since the 2006 Lebanon war; Houthi forces in Yemen have demonstrated the capacity to strike targets at considerable range using relatively low-cost technology; Iraqi militia groups with Iranian connections are embedded in the political and security structures of a country in which the United States has enormous political and economic investments. A military confrontation with Iran, in other words, would not be a contained bilateral affair but would likely trigger a cascade of secondary conflicts across a region already stretched thin by decades of intervention and instability. Whether the costs of such an escalation have been adequately factored into American strategic planning is a question that deserves serious scrutiny.

5. The Fracturing of the Atlantic Alliance and the Crisis of Multilateralism

One of the most significant, if underappreciated, aspects of the Trump administration's foreign policy has been its impact on the cohesion of the Atlantic alliance. NATO, which has served as the institutional backbone of American global strategy since 1949, rests on certain foundational assumptions: that major military action by any member state will be consulted on collectively, that the defence commitments embodied in Article 5 will be honoured, and that disputes within the alliance will be managed through established institutional channels. The Trump administration has, on numerous occasions, displayed a willingness to act in ways that challenge each of these assumptions.

The response of major European powers — France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom — to the prospect of direct military confrontation in the Persian Gulf has been instructive. Each has, in varying degrees of explicitness, sought to distance itself from unilateral American action, to assert its own independent assessment of the strategic situation, and to resist the assumption that alliance membership entails automatic co-belligerency in operations for which there has been no meaningful consultation. This is not a trivial development. The Atlantic alliance has survived previous strains — Suez in 1956, the Iraq war in 2003 — but each strain leaves its mark on the institutional architecture and the reservoir of mutual trust that sustains it.

The broader crisis of multilateralism that the Trump administration's conduct has accelerated is, of course, not entirely of its making. The United Nations Security Council has long been paralysed by the veto power of the permanent five, and its capacity to respond effectively to violations of the rules-based order has always been contingent on great-power alignment that is frequently absent. But there is a difference between an imperfect multilateral system struggling to manage a complex world and a world in which a leading member of that system openly signals its contempt for the constraints it is supposed to uphold. The League of Nations was destroyed in part by the aggressions of revisionist powers; it is an uncomfortable question whether the United Nations faces a similar threat from within its own founding membership.

Brzezinski's classic analysis of the geopolitical imperatives of American primacy argued that maintaining leadership of a coalition of willing partners was both more sustainable and less costly than direct imperial domination (Brzezinski, 1997, p. 198). The trajectory of the Trump administration's foreign policy appears, on this reading, to represent a departure from that strategic wisdom — one that may ultimately prove more damaging to long-term American interests than to those of its nominal adversaries.

6. The Emerging Multipolar Horizon: Russia, China, and the Reconfiguration of Global Order

No analysis of the current moment in international affairs would be complete without attention to the ways in which American unilateralism is interacting with the longer-term shift in the global balance of power. The emergence of China as a genuine peer competitor, and the reassertion of Russian strategic ambitions in Eurasia and beyond, have fundamentally altered the context in which American foreign policy operates. The unipolar moment — if it ever truly existed — has passed. The question is not whether the international system will become more multipolar but how the transition will be managed, and at what cost.

Both Russia and China have interests in Iranian stability that go well beyond any immediate tactical alignment. Iran is a critical node in China's Belt and Road infrastructure ambitions, a major potential energy supplier, and a strategic buffer against American encirclement. For Russia, a weakened or destabilised Iran would remove a significant source of leverage in Middle Eastern diplomacy and potentially open the Persian Gulf to a more unobstructed American naval presence. Both states, for these reasons, have strong incentives to provide Iran with the diplomatic cover, economic support, and — potentially — military reassurance that would make it more capable of withstanding American pressure. This triangular dynamic — American pressure, Iranian resistance, Russian-Chinese support — is one of the defining structural features of the current moment in Middle East geopolitics.

The question of Taiwan adds a further dimension of complexity. Chinese strategic planners are, with good reason, attentive to the ways in which American military engagement in the Middle East affects Washington's capacity and political will to honour its commitments in the Indo-Pacific. A prolonged and costly American confrontation with Iran — one that absorbs naval assets, strains alliance relationships, and exhausts domestic political capital — inevitably affects the credibility of American deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. These linkages are not lost on Chinese strategic analysts, and they constitute one of the less visible but potentially most consequential dimensions of the current crisis.

Conclusion

7. An Inflection Point and Its Uncertainties

The period under examination in this article may, in retrospect, come to be seen as a structural inflection point in the post-Cold War international order — a moment at which the norms, institutions, and power relationships that emerged from the Second World War and the Cold War's end were subjected to stresses that revealed, with unusual clarity, their underlying fragility. Whether those structures will be reconstituted in a modified form, replaced by something qualitatively different, or simply allowed to erode in a prolonged period of disorder, remains genuinely uncertain.

What seems less uncertain is that the logic of coercive hegemony — the presumption that overwhelming military and economic power confers the right to reshape the international environment unilaterally, to set the terms of other states' sovereignty, and to override the constraints of international law whenever they prove inconvenient — carries within itself the seeds of its own limitation. The military history of the past two decades offers ample evidence of the gap between the capacity to impose destruction and the capacity to achieve stable political outcomes. Iran is not a small country; it is not militarily weak by regional standards; it has a population with deep and historically grounded reasons to resist foreign coercion; and it has cultivated, over four decades of sanctions, a set of asymmetric capabilities and regional relationships that significantly complicate any straightforward military calculation.

The appropriate conclusion, then, is not a confident prediction but a set of analytically grounded observations. American power remains formidable; but formidable power is not the same as effective power. The international system appears to be moving toward a more genuinely multipolar configuration; but multipolarity is not synonymous with stability or justice. The institutions of global governance are under severe strain; but they represent accumulated investments in the management of conflict that cannot easily be rebuilt once destroyed. And the Middle East, as always, will bear a disproportionate share of the costs of whatever choices the great powers make — a fact that deserves to be stated plainly, even if it is rarely permitted to alter the calculations of those with the power to make different ones.

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