Courtesy Reuters  American Primacy in Perspective  Purchase
Article   More than a decade ago, political columnist Charles
Krauthammer proclaimed in these pages the arrival of what he
called a "unipolar moment," a period in which one superpower,
the United States, stood clearly above the rest of the
international community ("The Unipolar Moment," America and the
World 1990/91). In the following years the Soviet Union
collapsed, Russia's economic and military decline accelerated,
and Japan stagnated, while the United States experienced the
longest and one of the most vigorous economic expansions in its
history. Yet toward the close of the century readers could find
political scientist Samuel Huntington arguing here that
unipolarity had already given way to a "uni-multipolar"
structure, which in turn would soon become unambiguously
multipolar ("The Lonely Superpower," March/April 1999). And
despite the boasting rhetoric of American officials, Huntington
was not alone in his views. Polls showed that more than 40