Charles A. Ray
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 there was a brief period in the United States where people envisioned the unipolar world, where the United States was the sole remaining superpower with unchallenged supremacy globally. Not everyone envisioned this in the same way. Some, such as US diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick, thought that the United States should learn to “be a power, not a superpower, and revert to the status of a normal nation,” while columnist Charles Krauthammer declared the United States the “unchallenged superpower tasked with laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” What all seemed to agree on was that there was no longer a superpower challenger to the United States. Threats would be diffuse and likely based on cultural differences rather than ideology, but they could be managed. In many ways, though, US foreign policy in this immediate post-Cold War period was in flux.
China Replaced the Soviets as the New Bogeyman
That all began to change between 2000 and 2010, when the People’s Republic of China began its global economic ascension and its challenge to American dominance in the international order. The ensuing rivalry, while not in the nature of the ideological and military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, has increased tensions between the world’s two largest economies, and nowhere is it more evident than in sub-Saharan Africa, where the People’s Republic of China has supplanted the United States and the European Union as a trading partner.
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