-clip- For me, it's not as if the United States' power has suddenly _increased_, or that we've developed some new terror weapon. It's just that the main opposition doesn't exist anymore.
Look at it this way. Let's say Chris Doss and I were the two biggest weightlifters in the world, and we're pretty evenly matched, so people call us super-weightlifters. Then, one day, I die, leaving Chris without any real competition Has Chris suddenly become stronger? Has he magically become a "hyper-weightlifter?" No.
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CB: It's a not an original idea on my part, but if you introduce some notion of the relative to this, or even old bourgeois "balance of power " theory, it should be obvious that there is a sense in which when two "powers" "deter" each other, the power of each is in some sense reduced. If this deterence is removed because one of the powers recedes, then the remaining power does increase in power relatively to other "powers".
On the weightlifter analogy, Chris suddenly becomes stronger than his closest rivals , whereas before, he was not relatively stronger than his closest rival.
I'm not per se arguing for the particular term "hyperpower." But it is important to realize that U.S. imperialism is much stronger in the above relative sense ,because its expansions are no longer checked by the Soviet Union, and many other socialist nations. That is part of the modification of the theory of imperialism that Doug and others have called for. The fall of the SU fundamentally changed imperialism by making it relatively stronger or more powerful. Just as the existence of the SU created a need to fundamentally modify Lenin's theory of imperialism from 1916. In fact, the current needed modification is a modification of the earlier modifications.
It is grossly false claim that Leninists have not made some of the modifications of imperialist theory along the lines that I mention here.
The main influences in changing imperialism in developing a new accurate description of imperialism are from the big , bad, Evil Empire, but anti-Sovietism makes this difficult to take account of.