Wallerstein on American primacy

A number of IR theorists have long warned us about the specter of balancing coalitions to counter U.S. influence, resulting in global multipolarity.  (Realists, unfortunately, have been among the most confident forecasters of this alleged inevitability.) Unfortunately the expanding financial crisis is giving everyone a reason to resuscitate this argument.  The subject is a tired one, and I’m not going to spend words and energy going into it at the moment [if you care, look here, I guess]. But reading this poorly-executed piece on the competing theories about American preeminence, one particularly egregious claim jumped out at me. 

Immanuel Wallerstein – “who,” the writer helpfully tells us, “has been predicting the end of the American empire since the 1980s” – is pretty sure the U.S. is done.  Everyone’s favorite dependency theorist bases this assessment on “two standout factors: the Iraq war, which not only demonstrated but actually accelerated this decline in power, and then the way that the president put the American government in such deep debt. What we see playing out before us is the culmination of these actions.” 

But here’s the best bit:

“Look at Georgia,” says Wallerstein of Yale, noting that Russian troops remain in the country two months after demands from Washington that it depart. “All the U.S. can do is shout — and not even shout that loud.”

Which kind of makes me wonder: when does Wallerstein imagine the United States to have been strong enough to do anything else to assert or defend the independence of a tiny Russian neighbor?