THE AMERICAN PURSUIT OF HEGEMONY
The United States is the only regional hegemon in modern history. Five other great powers—Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—made serious attempts to dominate their respective regions, but they all failed. The United States did not end up dominating the Western Hemisphere in a fit of absentmindedness. On the contrary, the Founding Fathers and their successors consciously and deliberately sought to achieve hegemony in the Americas. In essence, they acted in accordance with the dictates of offensive realism.