Political Transformation

1. Political Transformation • Accelerating spread of western style liberal democracies fundamentally reset the global political system • Helped topple the Berlin Wall in 1989 • Collapsed the Communist Bloc • Ended the Cold War • Set a Uni-Polar World • US as the Global Hegemon using its Soft and Hard Power to set the rules of the game • The universalization of Western liberal democracy, reinforced by the market fundamentalism of capitalism, represented the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final stage of human government. • Some saw the global surge in Democracies symbolizing the "end of history.”

2. The Tools of the American Century • Soft Power • ability to attract and co-opt, rather than coerce with force or money, as a means of persuasion • Culture, ideals, images, outlooks, rhetoric • People worldwide found the American form of self-government attractive and reset their societies along the same lines. • Now, if you resisted our standards…. • Hard Power • Use of military, financial, and/or economic coercion to influence the behavior interests of other political agents • Nation as Peacekeeper