US Hegemony and Polycrisis: How Complex Risks Polarize Domestic Politics

• In Event: Uncertain Transatlantic Relations: Domestic Challenges in Interconnected Spaces

Abstract

The 21st century is marked by a multitude of crisis situations that can be described as a complex system of parallel, overlapping, and connected crises on a global scale. Such a polycrisis can potentially lead to the failure of political and societal systems. In the realm of international politics, polycrises challenge conventional international power structures as their management requires an acknowledgment of their complexity, non-linearity, and social diffusion. U.S. hegemony has proven increasingly insufficient to provide international stability through conventional means, i.e., public goods provision and coercion, in response to such complex systems of crises in the recent decade. Instead, most major international crises have weakened bipartisanship consensus at home and incentivized the politicization of these international crises for political gains. This paper examines U.S. crisis management over the course of the last five years, investigating how major crises, such as the Ukraine war but also the Covid pandemic, has been perceived by policymakers and how foreign policy preferences were reasoned. Relying on second image reverse theory, the paper develops hypotheses that capture how and why polycrises polarize domestic politics, making a novel contribution to this scholarship by arguing that international politics can be a second source of domestic division within democracies. For this purpose, the paper conducts a discourse analysis of public and political debates in the U.S. over time, and compare them with the foreign policy conduct of the administration in response to the polycrisis. The findings of this paper contribute to US foreign policy and polarization research but also to the social science scholarship on complexity and power.

Author

• Gordon Friedrichs, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law