The ‘American Century’– Is it over? Was it ever? What does it mean? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ John Fousek Program in International Relations, New York University, 19 University Place, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA. E-mail: john.fousek@nyu.edu Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Is the American Century Over? Polity: Cambridge, UK, 2015, 146 pp., $12.95, ISBN-13: 978-0745690070 (paperback) Abstract | Several recent books contribute to the ongoing debates concerning US global power, decline of its hegemony and the future of world order. This essay examines these debates through an assessment of Joseph S. Nye, Jr.’s study, Is the American Century Over? Jeremiads about US ‘decline’ have recurred since the 1970s. Yet prophesies of America’s demise have yet to hold up. Nye makes a persuasive case for the persistence of US ‘primacy’ and the likelihood of its continuing for decades longer. Nye uses ‘the American Century’ as a metaphor for the period of US primacy. As a culturally symbolic keyword in US political discourse, the ‘American Century’ merits closer interrogation than Nye provides. The term remains a rhetorical construct – a polemical tool – rather than an analytically useful concept. International Politics Reviews (2016) 4, 17–20. doi:10.1057/ipr.2016.1 Keywords: US hegemony; primacy; US decline; ‘American Century’; world order Pundits, policy analysts and scholars have long wrestled with questions about the United States as a global power and the nature of its ‘world role’. From the late 1940s through the 1980s, the Cold War quieted these questions with a single if oversimplified answer: the purpose of US power was to contain the perceived global threat of Soviet Communism. Since the Soviet Union’s demise, assess- ments of US world leadership have ranged widely, from the triumphalist to the tragic to the trivial. In the first dec- ades of the twenty-first century, notions of ‘American empire’, ‘global hegemony’, ‘American decline’ and ‘a New American Century’ have been pointed sites of con- tention. The US foreign policy discourse today has taken shape in relation to a series of developments since the year 2000: the election of George W. Bush; the September 2001 Al Qada attacks in New York and Washington; the so- called ‘global war on terror’; the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the 2008 financial crisis and its continuing global economic repercussions; the increasing assertiveness of Russia and China; deepening instability across the greater Middle East; and the expanding refugee crisis that threa- tens to undermine the European Union. President Barack Obama shied from the ‘global war on terror’ framework while overseeing a far-reaching campaign of drone warfare against terrorist targets in sovereign states and expanding US military operations around the world. Although his predecessor’s policies squandered vast reservoirs of US power and prestige, President Obama has been a lightning INTERNATIONAL POLITICS REVIEWS | IPR VOLUME 4 | MAY 2016 | 17 © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved REVIEW ARTICLE