TY - JOUR AU - Cox, Michael AB - New Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2001 Whatever Happened to American Decline? International Relations and the New United States Hegemony MICHAEL COX If international relations is to be judged by its ability not merely to understand the world as it is but to anticipate what it might become, then by any measure it has to be judged to be—or to have been—one of the more dismal of the social sciences. The list of either what it got wrong, or did not get right, is perhaps too long to bear repetition here, possibly best forgotten. Others, however, may not let us forget. One such was the senior editor of a major foreign policy magazine. Who, he asked, called the following? The end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe? The collapse of the Soviet Union? The East Asian crisis? Japan’s swift transformation in the 1990s from economic model and powerhouse to nancial basket-case? The answer, he concluded, was virtually no-one. Nor, he might have added, did many people seem to anticipate the complexity of the new international order either. In fact, most experts after 1989 tended to take refuge in old intellectual certainties—with either dire predictions coming from TI - Whatever Happened to American Decline? International Relations and the New United States Hegemony JF - New Political Economy DO - 10.1080/13563460120091333 DA - 2001-11-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/taylor-francis/whatever-happened-to-american-decline-international-relations-and-the-HOCTBRjFMJ SP - 311 EP - 340 VL - 6 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -