In the autumn of 1956, the British Empire discovered the limits of its own reach in the waters of a canal it had long treated as a private possession. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, Britain, acting in concert with France and Israel, mounted a military operation that succeeded on the battlefield and failed everywhere that mattered. The decisive blow came not from Cairo but from Washington, which declined to defend a sliding pound and withheld assistance from the International Monetary Fund until London agreed to withdraw. Britain still possessed a global navy, a web of colonies, and the reflexes of a great power. What it no longer possessed was the capacity to act decisively without the consent of another. The episode demonstrated that the United Kingdom could no longer pursue an independent foreign policy on questions of consequence. It was, in retrospect, the moment a hegemon quietly became something lesser: a quasi-hegemon.
The question worth posing is whether the United States now stands at an analogous threshold. The conventional framings are familiar and, for the most part, unsatisfying. One holds that American power is in straightforward decline; another, that a rising China is poised to displace it as the organising centre of world affairs. Neither captures the actual texture of the moment. The more precise proposition is that the unipolar order proclaimed after the Cold War has not collapsed but mutated, that Washington retains preponderant material capabilities while having lost the two attributes that once made it hegemonic in the fuller sense.
What those attributes are is a matter of some theoretical settlement. In the tradition of hegemonic stability theory associated with Kindleberger, Gilpin, and Keohane, hegemony rests on two foundations: an overwhelming margin of relative capability, and the capacity and willingness to underwrite international order – to author and enforce rules, furnish public goods such as open sea lanes and a stable reserve currency, and secure at least the tacit consent of others to that leadership. Charles Krauthammer’s celebrated 1990 essay described the post-Soviet condition as a “unipolar moment,” and he was careful, even then, to insist it was a moment rather than a settlement. By the end of the decade, Samuel Huntington had already refined the picture, characterising the world not as unipolar but as “uni-multipolar“, a single superpower obliged to act alongside several major powers, unable to resolve the largest questions on its own. Quasi-hegemony is the maturation of that condition. It describes a state that retains the first foundation, material preponderance, particularly in global military reach, but possesses the second only partially: it can no longer reliably convert capability into outcomes across every theatre, and it no longer monopolises the authorship of global rules.
The first deficiency, the non-fungibility of power, to borrow the language of the discipline, was on conspicuous display in the Persian Gulf this year. The asymmetry between American and Iranian military capacity is not in dispute; it is vast by any measure. Yet when Tehran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed in response to American and Israeli strikes, that asymmetry did not translate into command of the waterway. Through the strait passes roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas; within weeks of the closure, tanker traffic collapsed to near zero, war-risk insurance premiums multiplied, and the International Maritime Organisation reported that some 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships had been stranded. The United States responded with a naval blockade of the Iranian coast and months of attrition. It did not, however, force the strait open. The waterway was ultimately reopened not by force majeure but through a negotiated memorandum of understanding. Most tellingly, when Washington called upon NATO and China to help reopen the strait and protect commercial shipping, both declined. A hegemon’s summons to share the burden of a collective good went unanswered. Overwhelming military superiority, in the event, secured neither swift nor unilateral control of a single chokepoint, a circumstance whose resemblance to Suez is difficult to ignore.
The second deficiency concerns the authorship of rules. For three decades after 1991, the United States enjoyed a near-monopoly on the agenda of global governance, setting the terms of trade liberalisation, financial supervision, and humanitarian intervention with little serious competition. That monopoly has lapsed. Over the past five years China has promulgated a sequence of normative frameworks of expanding ambition: the Global Development Initiative (GDI, 2021), the Global Security Initiative (GSI, 2022), the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI, 2023), and, most recently, the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), unveiled by Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin in September 2025. Beijing frames the GGI as an “overarching” framework binding the other three, organised around sovereign equality, “true” multilateralism, and expanded voice for the Global South, and according to China, it reports support from more than 140 countries and international organisations. The substance of these initiatives is, by and large, thin. For now, they remain more rhetoric than enforceable action, vague in their commitments, non-binding in their mechanisms, and not infrequently contradicted by Beijing’s own conduct, as when China obstructs the Security Council reform that India, Japan, Germany or Brazil seeks. Yet the analytical point does not depend on the initiatives succeeding. The mere fact that a second power can now set a competing agenda that much of the developing world feels obliged to engage is itself sufficient to end the rule-making monopoly.
None of this amounts to a declaration of American decline, still less to the arrival of a Chinese hegemony. China is not a hegemon: its writ does not run universally, its initiatives lack the institutional density of the order they would amend, and the United States retains financial and military instruments without equal. There is, moreover, an instructive disanalogy with 1956. Britain became a quasi-power within a system in which a clear successor, the United States, was already ascending to take its place; its diminution was transitional. Washington today confronts no single heir but a more diffuse erosion of its primacy, which suggests that quasi-hegemony may prove not a way station but a relatively durable structural condition.
For the middle and rising powers (India among them), the implication is the widening of room for manoeuvre that always accompanies the loosening of a single pole, and the corresponding premium on strategic autonomy and careful hedging. Krauthammer warned that the unipolar moment would not endure. What has succeeded it is not the crisp multipolarity that so many predicted, but a textured interregnum in which the strongest state can still project force everywhere and dictate outcomes almost nowhere. That, for the present, is the quasi-hegemonic moment.
