Nations with hegemonic ambitions proclaim their values as the absolute standard of reference and impose strategic paralysis by force, seemingly encouraging the creation of their mirror image. In this sense, hyperterrorism, which uses asymmetrical methods to get round the obstacles and rules laid down by the masters of the international game, is surely the illegitimate child of hyperpower.
A Hegelian approach can help us to understand the identity struggle, which lies behind the purely physical struggle, being played out between those who feel themselves enslaved and their oppressors–real or imagined.
By the imperialist attitude which it has adopted since its origins, expressed overtly with the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine and continued by the ‘Big Stick’ policy enunciated by Theodore Roosevelt, the United States positioned itself among the rulers of the world. This domination has been expressed in the economic and military spheres, but also in the cultural domain. The United States, using the weapons of soft power and hard power in turn, imposes the rules of the game on the international chessboard, as a referee in conflicts and a regulator of trade flows, representing allegedly universal prescriptive moral values and promoting the ‘American way of life’, as leader of a Western model which it wants to see established in non-Western countries which have not yet reached full maturity.
Although the criticisms levelled at a nation which sometimes behaves in a tyrannical fashion under the banner of freedom appear legitimate, as do the attempts made by subjugated states to free themselves, it is nevertheless difficult to blame a power for wanting to maintain itself as such, by virtue of a natural tendency termed conatus(1) by Spinoza, and in which one can discern, more prosaically, the expression of a survival instinct. It is also easy to imagine that, having reached the ultimate stage of hyperpower, this would progressively close in on itself, following the example of Gyges the Lydian,(2) in the intoxicating spiral of supposedly unlimited freedom of action and the feeling of invulnerability which flows from it and is liable to lead to excesses.
It goes without saying that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Eastern bloc reinforced the hegemonic inclinations of the United States, the USSR having constituted a sizeable counterweight up to the 1990s as well as a refuge behind which governments which disputed the United States’s authority could shelter, and whose existence justified the adoption of a policy of ‘containment’. The hardening of interventionist policy, manifest during the first Gulf War and subsequent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, clearly illustrates this sudden raising of the barriers and the increased imperialist propensity which resulted from it.
