In the grand theatre of international relations, hegemony is often portrayed as a deliberate act of dominance, a superpower’s calculated extension of military might, economic leverage, or cultural influence to maintain its perch atop the global order. Yet beneath the visible manoeuvres of leaders and policies lies an invisible force: a structural imperative that compels hegemony to propagate itself relentlessly. Propagation is often improvised, sometimes resisted by allies, and occasionally self-defeating, but the incentive structure repeatedly pushes dominant powers back toward centrality. This force is not born of ambition alone but of necessity. It is the gravitational pull of systems designed for survival in an anarchic world. Hegemons must expand, adapt, and entrench their influence, because stagnation invites erosion and retreat risks collapse. To understand this dynamic is to grasp why empires, from Rome to Britain to the contemporary United States, rarely fade gracefully. They either perpetuate their reach or unwittingly topple their own leadership.
At its core, hegemony is not merely power wielded. It is power institutionalised. Drawing from realist theories, such as those articulated by Robert Gilpin in War and Change in World Politics, hegemony emerges when a dominant state establishes rules, norms, and institutions that favour its interests while providing public goods like security, trade stability, and financial order to subordinates. This creates a self-reinforcing architecture. The hegemon’s centrality generates dependencies that, in turn, sustain its primacy. However, this system is inherently unstable. As Gilpin argues, the costs of maintaining hegemony rise over time, through military overextension, economic burdens, and domestic discontent, while challengers exploit weaknesses. The invisible force, then, is the compulsion to propagate: to innovate tools of control, co-opt rivals, and deepen entanglements, lest the structure crumble under its own weight.
Consider the Roman Empire as a historical archetype. Rome’s hegemony began with conquest but solidified through an invisible web of roads, aqueducts, legal codes, and client states. This infrastructure propagated Roman influence by making dependence convenient. Provinces benefited from Pax Romana’s stability, yet this very stability demanded constant expansion to secure borders, extract resources, and quell internal decay. When propagation faltered under emperors such as Commodus, marked by complacency and corruption, the system turned inward. Barbarian incursions exploited neglected frontiers, and economic stagnation toppled the empire’s leadership, culminating in the sack of Rome in 410 CE. The force was invisible because it operated through incentives: propagate outward to harvest tribute and loyalty, or face internal rot that undermines the core.
Fast-forward to the British Empire, where the invisible force manifested in the “imperial overstretch” Paul Kennedy described in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Britain’s nineteenth-century hegemony rested on naval supremacy, colonial trade networks, and the gold standard, which propagated influence by enforcing global economic rules. Yet this required perpetual expansion into India, Africa, and Asia to access markets and raw materials. The force compelled propagation through economic logic. Without new colonies, industrial rivals like Germany and the United States would erode Britain’s edge. By the First World War, failure to adapt, including resisting multipolar shifts, led to exhaustion. The empire’s leadership toppled not from defeat alone but from the internal contradictions of a system that demanded endless growth. Post-1945 decolonisation was the inevitable unwind, as dependencies rebelled and domestic welfare commitments drained the metropole.
In the modern era, the United States exemplifies this force with striking clarity. Post-Second World War, American hegemony propagated through institutions like Bretton Woods, NATO, and the dollar’s reserve role, creating an “invisible architecture” of financial centrality, alliance commitments, and technological standards. This force is not conspiratorial but structural: the United States is strongly incentivised to propagate in order to preserve the dollar’s centrality, secure energy flows, and control strategic chokepoints. In the latest BIS triennial survey (April 2025), the dollar was one side of about 89.2% of global FX transactions, underscoring how deeply it remains embedded in the world’s financial plumbing.
This structural imperative expresses itself through shifting instruments. Interventions in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) normalised regime disruption in the name of threat containment, while sanctions on Venezuela and Iran pursued alignment through financial exclusion rather than occupation. In early 2026, however, the spectrum appeared to widen. On 3 January 2026, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and transferred him to the United States to face longstanding criminal charges, signalling a move beyond economic coercion towards direct leadership removal.
Then, on 28 February 2026, multiple major outlets reported that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed during joint US–Israeli strikes on Tehran, with Iranian state media later confirming his death. Whether framed as deterrence or regime disruption, the episode illustrates how a hegemon may shift from financial exclusion to high-risk kinetic pressure when it judges earlier instruments insufficient.
Tariffs and technology export controls extend the same logic into trade, turning market access into conditionality. Even the Ukraine crisis accelerated propagation, not because Europe lacked agency, but because crisis and architecture interact. Europe chose diversification through its own policy frameworks, including REPowerEU, yet the outcome entrenched new dependencies, with the United States supplying about 60% of EU LNG imports in January 2026, up from 53% a year earlier, according to Kpler data shared with Reuters, reinforcing American leverage even as European officials warn against swapping one dependency for another.
Yet propagation is double-edged. The invisible force compels action to avert decline, but overreach can topple the hegemon’s own leading edge. As Joseph Nye warns in The Paradox of American Power, soft power, legitimacy derived from cultural appeal and normative consistency, is eroded by perceived hypocrisy. Selective enforcement of international law, or the gap between proclaimed values and applied force, becomes an engine of backlash. That backlash is not merely rhetorical. It is institutional. BRICS has expanded to 10 full members and has created a partner layer that signals widening appeal even where cohesion remains questionable. Meanwhile, non-dollar trade experiments and gradual reserve diversification reveal a slow, uneven shift. IMF COFER data show the dollar’s share of disclosed global reserves at 56.92% in Q3 2025, down slightly from the previous quarter and far below earlier historical highs, yet still dominant. The renminbi’s use in FX trading has risen as well, with BIS-linked reporting placing it at about 8.5% of global FX trades, reinforcing a broader point: challengers are not replacing the dollar overnight, but they are constructing options.
Domestic constraints sharpen the dilemma. Fiscal strain, polarisation, and war-weariness do not merely exist in the background; they shape what kinds of propagation are politically sellable. This helps explain why modern hegemony often leans toward sanctions, tariffs, proxies, and regulatory leverage rather than open-ended occupations. The US Congressional Budget Office, for example, projects debt held by the public at about 101% of GDP in 2026, rising over the coming decade, which is the kind of internal pressure that gradually narrows strategic freedom.
The peril of non-propagation is evident in historical transitions. When hegemons fail to adapt, as Spain’s rigid mercantilism in the seventeenth century illustrates, their leadership topples from within as rivals innovate around them. For the United States, ceasing propagation altogether could invite faster currency diversification, alliance fractures, and technological decoupling, unraveling the architecture that underpins its centrality. Yet unchecked propagation breeds resentment, accelerating challengers like China’s Belt and Road, which constructs parallel dependencies at scale.
In essence, the invisible force of hegemony is a tragic dialectic: propagate to survive, or stagnate and perish. It forces expansion not only out of greed but from existential logic in a competitive system. For policymakers, the lesson is restraint tempered with innovation: bolster legitimacy, share burdens multilaterally, and reform institutions to accommodate multipolar reality. Otherwise, the force that built the edifice becomes the earthquake that topples it. In an era of rising powers and global interconnectedness, hegemony’s true test is not dominance but durability. Can it propagate without devouring itself? The answer will shape not just nations, but the very contours of our shared world.
Maq Masi Blog 
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