2. Is the primacy of one country over others a necessary prerequisite for a stable world?
3. What can disrupt the world order? 4. The greatest impediment to a harmonious world order
5. Is the existing international system more or less susceptible to the unilateral pressure of individual countries than in the past?
6. What can be done to increase the Member States’ commitment to the UN as a guarantor of collective security?
7. What changes in international relations were ushered in by the end of the Cold War?
8. Is the US likely to reduce its commitment to European security in the near future?
9. Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal.
10. History hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will emerge, and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world.
11. Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative to U.S. primacy. Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age.
12. Each of the potential hegemons of the twenty-first century seems to contain within it the seeds of decline; and Islam remains a diffuse force in world politics, lacking the resources of a superpower.
13. Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of the age of Alfred? It could, though with some important and troubling differences.
14. The defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward, to supranational institutions, but downward…. [I]t is the nonstate actors who truly wield global power.
15. The prospect of an apolar world should frighten us today a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne.
16. If the United States retreats from global hegemony its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony or even a return to the good old balance of power.
17. The alternative to unipolarity would not be multipolarity at all. It would be apolarity — a global vacuum of power.
