Caravanserai
The Hegemon in Decline – Or, the Plot is Thickening
Manuela Boatcă
September 1, 2026
When Devparna Roy and Daniel Pasciuti invited me to contribute a text to a new feature of JWSR and pointed to how we now, more than ever, needed commentaries on current events from a longue durée perspective, I was both honored to be considered and relieved to hear that others also missed, as the two of them put it, “reading and learning from Immanuel Wallerstein’s fortnightly blog-posts”. I had also just taken the role of speaking as a world-systems scholar in a joint discussion about the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, organized by Esteban Torres and Pablo Vommaro for the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (CLACSO) following the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. This is therefore a revised English-language version of that text. Yet, as audiences differ, so will the stakes of the text.
As world-systems scholars have known and written about for quite some time, the United States began to decline as a hegemonic power around 1970, and that trend accelerated during George W. Bush's presidency. Immanuel Wallerstein (2019) had identified three factors as leading to the United States' decline: the emergence of economic rivals, primarily Western Europe and Japan; what world-systems analysis terms the world 1968 revolution (Arrighi, Hopkins, Wallerstein 1989), which linked civil protests, student strikes and anti-war demonstrations around the world, impacting public opinion; and the United States' defeat in Vietnam. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 2001 then further accelerated the decline and invested it with anti-hegemonic symbolism. The decline thesis, first advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1980s, was widely dismissed as absurd. Rejection to this systemic perspective grew particularly strong in the 1990s, when it was widely believed across “the political spectrum that the United States had reached the height of unipolar dominance” (Wallerstein 2013).
Among politicians, experts and the general public, the assessment began to change after the subprime crisis and the global financial collapse of 2007–08. Since 2015, a substantial critical literature has emerged that addresses the erosion of U. S. power and economic influence in systematic terms (Rodríguez 2026). I want to advance two arguments here. The first is that the United States' decline as a hegemon has become increasingly evident in the conspicuous resport to military force that begins with the George W. Bush administration. The second is that that the so-called ‘Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine is a telling sign of an irreversible decline – one that we can grasp more clearly by way of Max Weber's thesis of the loss of the nation-state's monopoly on legitimate violence. Weber's account of the monopoly of violence must of course be lifted out of the national frame. Doing so is necessary if we are to think in a world-systems, longue durée perspective, and if we are to understand the mechanisms behind recent events initiated by the United States.
What, then, does the Monroe Doctrine actually entail? In its original 1823 formulation, President Monroe declared that the United States would regard any attempt by European powers to extend their dominion to the Western Hemisphere — including efforts to regain control of former colonies already recognized by the United States as independent nations — as 'dangerous to our peace and safety' and 'the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States' (Monroe [1823] n.d.). As Francisco Lobo reminds us in his analysis of the doctrine and its corollaries, this original meaning would eventually evolve into the 'Roosevelt Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine. It was President Theodore Roosevelt who, in 1904, revised Monroe’s rationale to admit the exercise of 'international police power' — that is, the use of force — against external powers that interfered in the United States' geopolitical neighbourhood. The Monroe Doctrine and its corollary went on to shape Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policies and John F. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress”, both attempts to secure alliances and regional hegemony, including in the domain of security, within the Americas (Lobo 2025).
What changes, then, when we turn on the present conjuncture? The National Security Strategy of the Trump administration, dated November 2025 and released the following month, states:
'After years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This 'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests” (White House 2025: 15).
The emphasis on the use of force – in the Roosevelt Corollary and Trump's current attempt to deny or restrict the capacity of third parties' to deploy forces or other threatening capabilities – points, to my mind, to loss by the U.S. state of the monopoly on violence as a legitimate tool of control – or at least as one that has so far only been unsuccessfully disputed worldwide. For Max Weber, the monopoly on violence belongs to nation-states; it is in other words, a modern phenomenon. Weber understands the state as 'the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence' within a particular territory’ (Weber [1919]: 2004: 33). 'Territory', he notes, is one of the defining features of the state. What is distinctive about our own age is that all other associations and individuals are granted the right to exercise physical violence only insofar as the state permits it; the state is the sole source of the 'right' to violence. 'Politics', on this account, would mean for us the striving (Streben) to share in power or to influence the distribution of power, whether among states or, within a single state, among the groups that compose it.
What matters for the context under analysis here is that, for Weber, a strong state is one that does not need to deploy force. The threat of force suffices. The moment the state is forced to exercise violence, it is weakened, because it has to follow through on the threat. Deterrence alone no longer holds. For Weber, the state monopoly on the use of violence was the result of gradual processes of rationalization in the West and was therefore taken to be a characteristic of modern societies, whereas uncontrolled and irrational violent conduct was what distinguished, in his terms, premodern societies. Nonstate violence, understood as the illegitimate and private use of force, was thereby excluded from modernity both spatially and temporally and anchored instead in a premodern past. This carried serious theoretical consequences: violence was not incorporated into the analysis of modernity until the late twentieth century, after two state-sanctioned world wars fought within Europe gave rise to the notion of a 'failed century' (Scheerer 2001) in a process of pacification that had otherwise been taken to be unidirectional. This focus on events internal to Europe alone suggests that both modernity and its 'Other' can be understood in terms of endogenous causality; it therefore entails a systematic disregard for the violence that modern European states unleashed in their colonies and in other non-European settings at the very moment when their own national societies were being gradually pacified. The interconnection between the monopoly on legitimate violence within the national territory on the part of sovereign Western states – the monopoly that made 'peaceful opportunities for acquisition' possible – and the parallel legitimation of political violence by those same states in the European colonies, in the name of the highly rational organization characteristic of modern capitalism, is conspicuously absent from Weber's account. He thus clearly dissociated Western capitalism from the colonial enterprise, and, ultimately, the emergence of modernity from the history of colonialism (Boatcă 2015: 15-16).
Setting that global context aside for a moment, it is worth recalling here the four key aspects associated with Weber’s concept of the threat of force. First, legitimate monopolization: for Weber, the state is the only entity authorized to use or threaten the use of force (through the police or the army), and this, when accepted by the population, is what makes threat legitimate. The secondly is the 'ultimate' recourse: although the state rarely employs force in everyday life, it is the existence of that threat which secures compliance with laws and orders. The third is territorial control: the state’s threat is limited to a specific territory, where it acts as the ultimate guarantor of order. The fourth is its relation to power: Weber defines power as the ability to carry out one’s will despite any resistance that may arise, and the threat of force is the primary instrument used to ensure compliance (Weber [1921] 2019).
What, then, does any of this have to do with the present conjuncture and the 'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine? To my mind, the National Security Strategy is a clear indication of the loss of the legitimate monopoly on violence. If in earlier periods, it did not appear like that the United States was in decline, the 'Trump corollary' comes close to a confession that it indeed is. Under the heading 'Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting', the document states:
'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over. We count among our many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.' (White House 2025: 12).
What is revealing here is the equation of the United States with the figure of Atlas, who held up the entire world, and the acknowledged necessity to renounce the claim to control the planet. That this former hegemon should concede – by way of the burden-sharing argument – that it no longer holds the monopoly on violence within the territory it claims to control — the hemisphere — and that the time has come to exercise force openly, amounts to a confession of its decline.
The exercise of force by the United States is of course nothing new (Al-Jazeera 2025, 2026). Many countries have already been bombed by the Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump administrations — several of them by all four, as illustrated in maps circulated in the context of the 2026 U.S. intervention in Venezuela (see fig. 1 and 2 below). The U.S. forces’ attack on Caracas, the abduction, removal from office and imprisonment of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3, 2026, on charges of narcoterrorism and drug-trafficking, have not customarily been considered an invasion because they did not involve territorial occupation. In an op-ed in The Wire, former Chilean ambassador and Global Studies scholar Jorge Heine has however pointed to the fact that this was “the first U.S. military attack on the South American mainland ever—crossing a significant threshold and leading us into uncharted waters” (Heine 2026).
Figure 1: U.S. Involvement in Regime Changes in Latin America
Image source: The World in Maps, Wikimedia Commons, public domain, January 2026
Fig. 2. Countries Bombed under the Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump administrations
Image source: The World in Maps, Wikimedia Commons, public domain, January 2026
In this context, what the press remarked on was not the novelty of the resort to military force but its brazenness, as Oona Hathaway has argued in an interview for the New Yorker (Chotiner 2026), a quality that rendered the violence more visible in its illegitimacy and even its illegality – given the lack of authorization from the United Nations or from the U.S. Congress for the attack on Venezuela or the already six-months long war in Iran. On August 28, 2026, the Trump administration announced an agreement with Venezuela’s interim government, led by Delcy Rodríguez, that would give the U.S. control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves for the next 100 years (NPR 2026). While the Venezuelan opposition was not party to the agreement, even supporters of the interim government have questioned its legality and its compatibility with national sovereignty (Al-Jazeera 2026). This, in turn, was not unprecedented in the longue durée, even if it shocked critics. It was however more characteristic for colonial powers rather than for a nation-state, let alone a 21st-century hegemon. Energy analyst Gregory Brew compared the U.S. agreement with Venezuela to the British Empire claiming ownership of Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves for the majority UK-government owned British Petroleum (Brew, cited in Al-Jazeera 2026).
I therefore argue that we are not entering a new phase or a crisis, but rather – as a longue durée perspective makes immediately apparent – observing the continuity of a decline that is further exacerbating the ongoing structural crisis of the modern/colonial world-system (see also Rodríguez 2026). The plot is thickening: the hegemon in decline no longer sets the rules by which others must act and secures compliance to it. It seeks to dominate through the ever more visible use, rather than mere threat, of force, and resorts to both force and coercive extraction while openly calling for allies to share in the burden of dominance and defense – and failing.
References
Al-Jazeera (2026): What’s Behind the U.S. Deal to Seize Control of Venezuelan Oil Reserves?, August 29, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/29/whats-behind-the-us-deal-to-seize-control-of-venezuelan-oil-reserves
Al-Jazeera (2025): A Timeline of CIA Operations in Latin America, November 26, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/26/a-timeline-of-cia-operations-in-latin-america
Boatcă, Manuela (2016): Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism, Routledge.
Chotiner, Isaac (2026): The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation: A Scholar of International Law on the Implications of the U.S. Arrest of President Nicolas Maduro, The New Yorker, January 3, 2026, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-brazen-illegality-of-trumps-venezuela-operation
Heine, Jorge (2026): The Trump Corollary and Venezuela, The Wire, January 8. https://thewire.in/world/the-trump-corollary-and-venezuela
Lobo, Francisco (2025): The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: Crisis or Opportunity?, RUSI Commentary, December 10, Royal United Services Institute, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/trump-corollary-monroe-doctrine-crisis-or-opportunity
Monroe, James [1823] n.d. The Monroe Doctrine. Milestone Documents. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine
Rodríguez, Fabricio (2026). Energy, Imperialism and Global Hierarchies in Dispute. The Violent Practices of U.S. Power from Venezuela to Greenland. In BMFTR-Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. Policy Paper No. 4., Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/18805805, p. 4
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2003): The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. The New Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2013): The Decline of U.S. Hegemony and the Next Global Power Struggle, Toward Freedom, November 6, https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/globalism/the-decline-of-us-hegemony-and-the-next-global-power-struggle/
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2019), U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony, Monthly Review, 55 (3), 23-29.
Weber, Max [1919] 2004. Politics as Vocation, p. 32-94 in The Vocation Lectures, edited by D. Owen and T.B. Strong, translated by R. Livingstone. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
White House (2025): National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, D.C.: The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
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