unipolar moment

The post-Soviet period when America had near-complete global control before financialization and manufacturing transfer to China.

The post-Cold-War American hegemonic order: globalized, capitalist, individualistic, and structured by Pax Americana, science, and the U.S. dollar.

The period after the Soviet collapse when U.S. power and culture appeared globally dominant.

The U.S.-dominated period that enabled cheap energy, global abundance, and middle-class imperial comfort, but that Jiang says is collapsing.

After the unipolar moment, Jiang says America shifted manufacturing to China, focused on finance, and thereby set up the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis named the liberal consumer democracy as the supposed apex of civilization, and Jiang treats that as the ideology of a unique American-led unipolar moment.

The current Iran war marks, for Jiang, the end of the unipolar moment created by American hegemony.

Jiang warns that expecting the Iran war to settle quickly and restore the old world is fantasy; the unipolar moment has ended and the choice is adaptation or death.

Jiang says baby boomers enjoyed a uniquely favorable life course: Great Society social supports, Reagan-era wealth opportunities, and unipolar American privilege.

Dave says American culture had extraordinary global goodwill around the Soviet collapse, symbolized by heavy-metal enthusiasm in Moscow.

Jiang says the American unipolar moment created a Roman-emperor middle-class lifestyle, but that lifestyle was unsustainable because it exploited the developing world and drained global resources.

Jiang argues the American unipolar moment depended on the world's belief that the U.S. empire was inevitable and invincible, enabling cheap global consumption through dollars, travel, imported food, and internet-connected markets.