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Wallerstein - US Hegemony in Decline

I completely agree with Wallerstein’s theory that US’s hegemony is in decline. The author discusses four important aspects of this decline: “the war in Vietnam, the revolutions of 1968, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the terrorist attacks of September 2001”. As the author points out in his article, nowadays no one fears the power of US and very few are the countries that respect the US – most of the European countries disagree with the position that US takes in the world – they get involved too much and too often in other countries’ businesses. In the past few years the repulsion towards this policy grew exponentially. Probably the first question that needs to be answered is “How did US become the world’s greatest power?” It is my belief that this was pure luck in the sense that the Atlantic Ocean separates the States from Europe and it also separated it from all the wars then went on in the last century. For the other world powers, the Soviet Union and Germany, would have been enormously difficult had they try to attack and eventually conquer America. No country could interfere in any way with United States, so it grew very powerful and very big in a relative short period of time. The “Pearl Harbor

Wallerstein argues that the war in Vietnam was a severe loss for United States. The US intervened in South Vietnam to prevent a corrupt government from being overthrown by the guerilla forces – guerillas were connected to the North Vietnam, where earlier a capitalist government was replaced by a Stalinist one. Also the Americans feared that if the communists were to win in South Vietnam, similar revolutions would burst out throughout Asia. Although United States used massive artillery and weapons in Vietnam, they still lost the war. Throughout the war, the Americans heavily bombed the Vietnamese with almost no success in stopping the flow of soldiers and supplies from the North. After each attacks female workers would repair the damages made by the bombs. Chemical agents were used in Vietnam which destroyed the vegetation and led to many birth defects. A lot of villages had been destroyed and more than two million Vietnamese died in the war, but the fighting spirit of the Vietnamese people could not be matched by the Americans – the communist Vietnamese were very determined and they fought ambitiously at all times, they believed in what they were fighting for. The South was not as committed and the Americans did not really care since they were not fighting for their own country. While more and