Predatory Hegemons

And the nemesis of power

My excellent friend and former colleague, Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School, calls them the predatory hegemons.[1] America, China and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule-- Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defense and economic partnerships.

Middle powers can seek to protect themselves from the predators, but they can’t keep the predators from ripping each other’s throats. So the biggest question in international politics is whether the predatory hegemons can cease their depredations and forge a new global order instead. From the hegemons’ point of view, a future in which the only question left is who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect.

Animal predators tend to stay out of each other’s back yards, feast only on prey that other predators won’t touch and risk a fight to the death only when the survival of their group is at stake. If this is true in the animal kingdom, it might be true in our fragile human world. As in the animal kingdom, a jungle without rules is too dangerous even for predators.

At least once before in history, great powers have drawn back from the fearful implications of a lawless world. We owe the order created in 1945 to the Soviet, American and British realization at Yalta and Potsdam that armed giants, one possessing nuclear weapons and another on the brink of doing so, would destroy each other unless they agreed to a basic framework of deconfliction and conflict management. The order was often violated, by the predators themselves, but at least it kept the world free of nuclear war. The question is whether a new order among the three predators is possible.

The current war in the Gulf lays bare just how perilously far we are from any global order at all. The Gulf region that made itself a global travel, energy and investment hub, in the American unipolar moment, is now sheltering in place as the hegemon seeks to revenge the 1979 hostage-taking in Tehran. America is discovering that when it settles scores from the past instead of setting up an order for the future, it ends up benefiting only its enemies.

America’s attack on Iran certainly sends its fellow competitors the message that the US is not afraid to use its frightening capabilities. But every predatory action by America produces an equal and opposite reaction from its competitors. Russia and China’s defense expenditures, currently a fraction of America’s, are climbing as a result.

America’s competitors also use their power to settle past scores instead of trying to create a future in which they can thrive. Rather than acquiescing in the collapse of the Soviet imperial space, President Putin decided to avenge the loss with an invasion of its sovereign neighbor. Russia’s savagery in Ukraine forced up NATO defense expenditure and brought Finland and Sweden into the alliance. At the end of four years of war, the Russian predator is weaker now than it was when it began, more friendless, more tyrannical, and more fragile. This is the nemesis that attends any preference for predation over order.

China is also obsessed with settling old scores, the Communist Party’s failure to absorb Taiwan in 1949, instead of accepting the democratic reality of the island and moving towards creating a new order in which its ascent as a world power is recognized and accepted. It has no vision of its hegemonic place to offer but is content to benefit from the mistakes of its competitors. As America bombs Iran, it is rapidly building up its nuclear arsenals. It has also taken advantage of America’s epic episode of self-harm. It is not hammering its universities and research institutes with ideological crusades. It is funneling state resources into the research that produces new technology, while avoiding wasting its weapon stocks—and its limited store of global legitimacy—by raining death on weaker countries.

As for America, it has been perennially unable to restrain its expansionary and redemptive impulses with a clear-eyed understanding of the limits of its power. Yet since Vietnam, some Americans have learned to temper hubris with realism. A former Pentagon official was heard to say recently, in my hearing, that America has war plans drawn up for every possible theater of operations on the world, but it only has the weapons to fight one war at a time. It has moved two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Mediterranean and Gulf regions, but that sends a message of weakness to China since it reveals that the US hasn’t the capacity to deploy both to the Gulf region and the South China sea.

Even the most powerful predator has to understand that there are limits to how far its military can stretch. American predation, first on display in Venezuela, now in Iran, is reaching objective limits in terms of its military capabilities, limits forced upon it by the challenge of deterring a rising China.

America’s war in the Gulf benefits its competitors in other ways. Due to the impact of the Gulf war on oil supplies, China will pay more for its oil, but it has already stocked 400 days’ worth. By forcing up oil prices, America has eased the pressure on the Russian state budget and extended Putin’s capacity to kill Ukrainians.

So a thoughtful predator might pause at this point to ask himself: if raining death on Iran so obviously benefits his competitors, shouldn’t he bring this misadventure to a quick end? Shouldn’t he refill his military stocks and redeploy his assets to areas of vital competition, like the South China Sea? Shouldn’t he reconsider the decision to abandon Ukraine and hence enable a rival predator’s victory?

If small wars empower his big competitors, shouldn’t a predator, with an instinct for self-preservation, raise his sights to the longer-term management of strategic competition? Wouldn’t it make sense to reach out to competitors and propose measures obviously in all their interest: deconfliction protocols, agreements not to use autonomous weapon systems, upper ceilings on nuclear weapon stocks, banning killer satellite systems in space? Even predatory powers might have an interest in this menu of mutually assured restraint.

Conflict avoidance would be rational behavior for hegemonic competitors. But are they rational? It was not rational for Russia to invade Ukraine. American behavior is so self-harming that something strange may be in play in Washington. We may be watching a predator masking its retreat from global responsibilities with a display of hyper-aggressive behavior which hides from itself the collapse of its own confidence and imperial resolve. A nation whose national security strategy recently warned Europe of ‘civilizational erasure’ may actually fear its own.

All the more reason to grasp that if predation has its limits, if even predators need rules for the jungle, then it is time for them all to sit down and figure out how to keep the nemesis of power from consuming each of them in turn. The problem is who takes the lead. In 1945, America had the confidence to be the first mover in solving the post-war world’s problem of strategic order. In 2026, it is in a phase of hysterically bellicose denial of any first mover responsibility to shape any order in which others may benefit beside itself. Until that changes, or until China and Russia seize the first mover advantage, the world edges closer to a degree of disorder that will render all the hegemons helpless.

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[1] Stephen M. Walt “The Predatory Hegemon: How Trump Wields American Power”, Foreign Affairs, April-May, 2026, ps. 8-23