The Rising Powers and the Dismantling of American Hegemony: Towards Reshaping the International System in Light of the Power Transition Theory

Abstract

This article attempts to shed light on the impasse that the international system is witnessing and the efforts to reshape it in the first quarter of the 21st century, in light of the transfer of power in its comprehensive sense between the major powers that constitute this system. Russia and China represent the two most prominent examples of rising revisionist powers seeking to form a multipolar international system and dismantle American hegemony, which seeks to install a unipolar international system under its leadership after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1990.
The prevailing international order that resulted from World War II and the conditions of the Cold War reflected a bipolar international balance of power. This order witnessed increasingly rapid and complex transformations, revealing the inability of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of international politics to approach the new conditions of the post-Cold War world. Especially with regard to the structure of the international system, the distribution of power within it, and the relations between the major powers that constitute it. Therefore, the global geostrategic balance and the transfer of power between the major powers in the international system at the beginning of the 21st century are among the topics around which strategic and geopolitical discussions and studies revolve, because they determine the basic characteristics of international relations and their interactions, and thus the structure of the international system. Therefore, the topic of the nature of the emerging international system after the Cold War and the transfer of power within it constituted a cognitive guide to discuss the implications of hegemony under the leadership of the United States, and the role of the rising revisionist powers to dismantle this hegemony, and establish a multipolar international system.