How to Broaden and Supplement Barack Obama's Proposals The outburst of the global economic crisis that occurred in the fall of 2008 drew a symbolic bottom line under the previous twenty years of boisterous international changes. In essence, no one called the U.S. dominance into question over these twenty years, yet the context started changing long before the financial landslide of September 2008. The financial and economic crisis is but a single manifestation of a general erosion of the regulatory functions. It testifies to the faults that the system of global governance has begun to make. The rise of new players who feel reluctant to embed themselves into an American-centric layout, the fast degradation of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and the big powers' inability to control unfavorable cross-border and regional processes are but the most vivid showings of the deepening dysfunction of the international system. The unipolarity that emerged after the Cold War failed to pave the way for an international system that would be based on America's "soft hegemony" and a ubiquitous proliferation of the American-style democracy and liberal market economy. The only superpower's attempts to rely exclusively on its own strength flopped. The nature of the post-hegemony phase in international relations will depend on the character and quality of interaction among the key centers of power. The formation of a balanced economic order is impossible without an improvement in U.S.-Chinese relations. China is This material is based on the report "Reconfiguration, Not Just a Reset" prepared by Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and the RIA-Novosti news agency for the meeting of the Russian-U.S. section of the Valdai discussion club. Main authors are: Sergei Karaganov, Timofei Bordachev, and Dmitry Suslov; Chief editor: Sergei Karaganov. Full version of the report is available at http://www.globalaffairs.ru/docs/Doklad_eng.pdf ... Читать далее