Varieties of US post-Cold War imperialism: Anatomy of a failed hegemonic project and the future of US geopolitics

Seeking to understand the variations of US post-Cold War imperialism, this article offers an explanation of the changes that have taken place in US geopolitical strategy since the early 2000s. Our central argument is that to make sense of these changes within underlying continuities we need to analyse the dialectical interplay between political agency -- in turn linked to specific social forces -- on the one hand, and changing structural conditions within the global political economy on the other. Adopting a neo-Gramscian approach we argue how geopolitical strategy is constructed through a network of actors whose practices are shaped by their own social positions as well as by the broader global structural context. Analysing these networks with Social Network Analysis we show how neoconservative intellectuals -- linked to dominant sections of US capital -- came to formulate a hegemonic project for the preservation of US primacy in the context of the rising contradictions of US-led neoliberal globalization. The ultimate failure of this hegemonic project, especially its failure to address the shortcomings of the still hegemonic neoliberal accumulation strategy, subsequently set the structural context in which the network around President Obama is now trying to formulate a more effective strategy