Is Covid-19 the End of US Hegemony?

In class on Monday, we discussed a Susan Strange article from 1990, entitled Finance, Information and Power. This article explained the different implications of relational and structural power of countries on the world stage, and provided a very relevant and nuanced analysis of these differences. However, in class, we dove into a debate on whether the structural power of the US was still at the level that it was when Strange originally wrote the article. Was the US structural hegemonic power still comparable to countries like Japan’s relational power? Although our discussion explored many interpretations of the downward trend in US Hegemonic power, a rather underexplored aspect of this debate is the role of Covid-19 in the decline of US Hegemonic Power. In this blog post, I will argue that the US’s handling of the pandemic, in addition to all of the other factors we discussed in class, has contributed to a major decline in US Hegemonic power since the release of Strange’s 1990 article. 

Our class discussion revolved around the question of whether or not US hegemonic power was still relevant on the global stage. But first, we needed to distinguish between Strange’s conceptions of relational and structural power. According to Strange, relational power occurs when a country has the capacity to act using international organizations or their status as a creditor holding foreign debt. For countries with relational power, it is convenient to hold some power over those in debt, but this power is limited because they will never have the same structural power that countries like the US have. For instance, acting with relational power can never be as effective as acting with structural power because simply holding debt over another country will never be sufficient to enforce any true change. In contrast, structural power, such as the US hegemonic power that was very prominent in 1990, can accomplish anything it sets its intentions on. Because the entire economic system was set around the US dollar, the US had a huge amount of hegemonic power. However, this power, admittedly, has declined due to several events since the 1990s. Firstly, US debt has grown substantially since the 1990s, and the dollar has come to hold much less reserve currency than it held in 1990. Additionally, while the US in the 1990s had just won the Cold War and won a place as an unchallenged leader, there are now many countries rising to rival status, such as China, as the Chinese market has grown substantially. Despite arguments for all of these elements contributing to the decline of US hegemonic power, there is one major event that is unrivaled in its effects on US power; and that is the Covid-19 Pandemic.

One article I found in the Oxford Academic, delves into the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on US Hegemony. According to the article, the pandemic has caused failure in US hegemony domestically, internationally, and in terms of monetary influence. Firstly, the article discusses, “how the failure to effectively manage the Covid-19 public bad has compromised America’s ability to secure the health of its citizens and the domestic economy, the very foundations for its international leadership.” In other words, the US’s failure to create adequate domestic policy to address the pandemic has created a decline in its hegemonic power because its domestic policy had previously been at the forefront of its global leadership. The article then dives into the issues Covid-19 has presented for US hegemony internationally. It explains, “how the US has already used the crisis strategically to reinforce its opposition to free international movement while abandoning the primary international institution tasked with fighting the public bad, the WHO.” Overall, the US’s actions in response to the pandemic on a global scale have been nothing short of a disaster, discrediting the biggest global health organization and opposing global movement. All of these actions have majorly contributed to the decline of US hegemonic power. Finally, the article brings up the point that even US monetary hegemony is at risk. According to the author, “while the only area where the United States has exercised leadership is in the monetary sphere…even monetary hegemony could be at risk if the pandemic continues to be mismanaged.” All in all, the US’s mismanagement of the pandemic could be the nail in the coffin of its days as an unrivaled hegemonic power, as there has been no event to expose its shortcomings as much as Covid-19 has.

Although our class discussion about the decline of US hegemonic power was extremely informative and insightful, I feel as if it was incomplete. Without a comprehensive consideration of the role of Covid-19 on our modern global system, one will never be able to fully understand the current status of US hegemonic power. And investigating unturned rocks like these leads me to believe that there are many other aspects of US hegemony that have not been analyzed in sufficient depth for us to be able to accurately determine the status of our country on the global stage.