Jeg har planer om å skrive en oppfølging til posten om Obama som ny president. Men det er eksamenstid, og akkurat nå er det viktigere for meg å få Gwen Stefani vekk fra toppen av bloggen. Så i mellomtiden presenterer Joseph Nye noen interessante tanker om hvordan det internasjonale maktbildet ser ut om dagen:

The larger question concerns the long-term future of American power. A new forecast for 2025 being prepared by the US National Intelligence Council projects that American dominance will be “much diminished,” and that the one key area of continued American superiority – military power – will be less significant in the competitive world of the future. This is not so much a question of American decline as “the rise of the rest.”

Power always depends on context, and in today’s world, it is distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar and likely to remain so for a while. But on the middle chessboard, economic power is already multi-polar, with the US, Europe, Japan and China as the major players, and others gaining in importance.

The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of government control. It includes actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets, as well as terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations. It also includes new challenges like pandemics and climate change. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, or hegemony.