Superpower vulnerability By Henry C K Liu

That the US is now the world's sole remaining superpower is above challenge. This status has affected the United States' approach to formulating foreign and domestic policies in the post-Cold War era.

In foreign policy, the US has been operating on the basis that its national values have been validated by triumph in the Cold War and that its resultant sole-superpower status now earns it both the moral right and the military means to spread such values over the whole world. Resistance to such self-righteous values is now deemed evil by US moral imperialism, in need of elimination not by persuasion but by force. This new approach has made the world less safe than it was during the Cold War, the end of which briefly entertained a false hope for a new age in which a world with only one superpower could thereafter live without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world has been plunged into successive holy wars of imperialistic moral conquest by the sole remaining superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks on to the US homeland. The impact on domestic policy from terrorist threats has in turn been the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the name of homeland security.

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