Transforming Hegemony: Domestic Ideologies and Arguments over the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy.

This paper examines the competing political justifications presented in the United States for policies designed to support and to restrain American hegemony from 1980-2000. During this period, the political questions about US hegemony shifted significantly: from whether US hegemony would survive the Cold War to what the US role as the lone superpower should be. Domestic political groups differed over the aims and effectiveness of proposed grand strategies to sustain hegemony, adapt to its loss, or benefit from it, and they disagreed over how those strategies would affect the US economy and society. What explains the differences in their views and how they adapted those views when international conditions changed between the 1980s and the 1990s? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]