As the Cold War drew to a close, a debate opened up about what would replace the bipolar international system—and what the United States’ new global role would be. In “The Unipolar Moment,” an influential essay published in Foreign Affairs in 1990, the columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that to see the United States as anything but the world’s “unchallenged superpower” was fantasy. U.S. policymakers may “dress unilateral action in multilateral clothing,” he wrote, but for the foreseeable future, the United States would be “the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict.” Washington could not afford to retreat from the world, even if it wanted to, Krauthammer urged. “The alternative to unipolarity is chaos,” he wrote. “If America wants stability, it will have to create it.”
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— Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Editor
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