М Е Ж Д У Н А Р О Д Н А Я А Н А Л И Т И К А 12 (3): 2021 173 Рецензии 10.46272/2587-8476-2021-12-3-173-179 Liberalism and American Hegemony: Over and Out Cooley, Alexander, and Daniel Nexon. Exit from Hegemony: Te Unraveling of American Global Order. Oxford University Press, 2020. Jeffrey Mankoff, NDU-INSS, Washington, USA Correspondence: jeffrey.a.mankoff.civ@ndu.edu As Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon note in their theoretically grounded and historically informed new book, U.S. international leadership has always been tightly bound up with concern about its impending decline. However, the past two and a half centuries have provided much support for Bismarck’s reported observation that God makes special providence for “children, fools, and the United States of America.” The challenge for any would-be Cassandra foretelling the decline of the United States or the world it made, therefore, lies in explaining why this time is different. A. Cooley and D. Nexon confront that task head-on in Exit from Hegemony, suggesting that an unprecedented combination of external challengers and internal breakdown have combined to produce a feedback loop hastening the unraveling of an American- dominated world only a generation or so after its post-Cold War apogee. Part of what makes Exit from Hegemony compelling is that the authors do not merely rehash a series of well-known mistakes but suggest that the nature of what they term the American hegemonic system always contained the seeds of its own demise. Unlike many works in the U.S. declinist tradition, A. Cooley and D. Nexon emphasize the intersection of domestic and foreign challenges, not in isolation from one another, but as an unanticipated product of U.S.-led globalization at the end of the Cold War. In their telling, this cascade of challenges resembles previous eras of hegemonic decline, suggesting that Washington’s predicament today echoes the twilight years of British hegemony before World War II more than it does, say, the era of concern about Japan’s rise in the 1980s. As the authors show, those factors – and the decline of U.S. hegemony – predated the Trump presidency and continue to operate today. A. Cooley and D. Nexon’s pessimism about the durability of the American hegemonic system places them firmly to one side of an emerging debate on the decline of not just the American hegemonic system but of America itself. More than many other scholars, A. Cooley and D. Nexon accept that the erosion of the American © Jeffrey Mankoff, 2021