American Hegemony Comes Home

Abstract

International theorists have long argued over the longevity of American hegemony and whether or not the American-centered international order is currently in crisis. What remains largely missing in many of the analyses of the history and present of American hegemony is an examination of how maintaining global hegemony affects or has affected domestic American political and economic institutions. Looking back at the early 1970s, I examine the nexus between the crisis of American global hegemony in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the project of neoliberalization in Chile and how the Chilean socioeconomic “laboratory” set an important precedent for the subsequent adoption of neoliberal reforms in the United States under the Reagan Administration. The reassertion of American hegemony was coextensive with a neoliberal project that was initially experimented with in Chile under the authoritarian rule of Augusto Pinochet.