Potential Hegemon Research Articles

Hegemony management: The US in the Asia‐Pacific

Managing hegemony is a hardy staple of Asia‐Pacific affairs, and indeed that regional notion was invented in part with an eye to it. Hegemony involves power asset distributions, their normative justifications, and imputed strategies to shape both. Managing hegemony treats what parties do to live with or modify distributions, justifications, and strategies. The parties are in roles: current hegemon, potential hegemon, or denier. Their actions depend on expectations. Coalitions form to maintain or change expected futures. Ideas (interpretations) affect power assets, justifications, and strategies. The parties compete over them and to provide persuasive interpretations of them, including about regional arrangements. Hegemony management in the Asia‐Pacific simultaneously involves one current and two potential hegemons (the US, China, and Japan), a host of other nations (deniers), and three functional arenas (economic, military, and identity). The US strives to maintain and enhance its position; Japan and China, to avoid hegemony by the other alone or in combination with the US; and other nations, to avoid hegemony by any one or combination of them. The APEC decade presents changing priorities and expectations among policy elites and key domestic constituencies. In spite of recent financial turbulence, hegemony outcomes are more likely to be unresolved than settled.