Assistant Professor of Government Ted Lehmann recently presented a paper titled "Unseating the American Leviathan? Oil and the Geopolitics of American Hegemonic Decline" at the International Studies Association annual conference in Montreal, Canada.
The paper examined the role of oil in the maintenance of American hegemony in the post-World War II era and evaluated the adaptations in U.S. strategic positioning since the rise of oil nationalism and China in the 1970s. Since the Iraq Wars, and despite the BP calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, the prospects of an energy transition off of oil were adjudged to be slight while China's growing ties with the Middle Eastern states were held to be the greatest near term risk to the U.S. position of primacy.
