Mahnur Asim

Hegemony is used in ancient Greece to define the hold, control, or paramount power of a state. In this context, it refers to dominance over economic, cultural, and military power to exert influence over others. Antonio Gramsci expanded the definition of hegemony through cultural and ideological dominance. This means a ruling class or power that sets the societal norms, making its values and ideas appear as "common sense" to the broader public, often known as universalism. The foundational pillars that built the supremacy of a hegemon are reserve currency, military supremacy, dominance over international institutions, and cultural hegemony or maybe sometimes a catastrophic push that shifts the global order, but it mostly does not work on rational grounds.

A reserve currency is one of the clearest expressions of structural power: the ability to shape the rules others operate within. The world's reserve currency is the one central banks hold, commodities are priced in, and trade is invoiced in. Kindleberger's hegemonic stability theory argued that an open, stable global economy needs a dominant power willing to provide public goods, an open market for other exports, and crucially, a stable reserve currency others can anchor to. This gap was bridged through the US dollar, and today it goes even further, because of network effects and infrastructure. Oil is priced in dollars (the petrodollar system). Most trade finance runs through dollar-dominated instruments. States hold their reserves in dollars, and beyond that, SWIFT, the payment messaging system, is also dollar-centric enough that the US can weaponize access to it. Cutting Iran or Russia off from SWIFT is a form of coercive power that has nothing to do with tanks or carriers. This is what some scholars call "weaponized interdependence”. This unilateral system leverages the US through a standardized hegemonic status. For China, yuan internationalization matters so much to be hegemon. A currency doesn't become a reserve currency just because the underlying economy is large. Japan's economy was huge in the 1980s, and the yen never displaced the dollar. It requires open capital accounts, deep, highly trusted financial markets that foreigners trust, and a rule of law that protects foreign asset holders. In China, the state controls capital, prefers a managed exchange rate, and has the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control over financial institutions. CIPS and bilateral currency swap lines are workarounds, not replacements; they reduce dollar dependency at the margins. This stance suggests that the yuan needs to be trusted as a reserve currency, that China needs more FDI, less government intervention, free markets, and expanding trade settlement.

International institutions function as a quiet weapon in shaping a global hegemon; these institutions operate through a quota system, and each state's financial contribution determines both its borrowing capacity and its voting power. The US holds around 16-17% of the IMF quota share; that means the US doesn't need allies or coalition-building to block structural change. It can veto reform alone. Along with that, the WTO, World Bank, and ICJ- all these institutions were US-dominated. ALTHOUGH China is trying to work around institutions such as the AIIB and banks. IMF commands nearly $1 trillion in lending capacity, while the AIIB holds roughly $100 billion. Despite the structural and financial size gap, there lies a deeper irony: these Chinese-led institutions still lend predominantly in US dollars, not yuan. Which means even China's alternative to the dollar-centric system ends up reinforcing the dollar rather than escaping it, remaining in the same dollar loop.

The status quo shows that conventional military power accelerates the dominance of a state through overseas military bases, military arsenals, and alliances. Military bases, in particular, are not merely operational assets; they function as status symbols of hegemonic power. The United States currently maintains over 750 overseas military bases and installations worldwide. Their significance lies not just in offensive capability but also in deterrence infrastructure. The U.S. extends beyond fixed bases to naval presence, including in the South China Sea, where the U.S. Navy conducts freedom-of-navigation operations to contest Chinese territorial claims. China, by contrast, does not rely on this basing model. It operates only one overseas military base, located in Djibouti. Instead of forward bases, China exerts its hegemony in the South China Sea by strengthening naval patrols and air defence networks, along with artificial islands it has built and militarised to reinforce its territorial claims.

Military arsenals remain central to shaping this balance. The US defence budget for 2026 stands at roughly $895 billion in contracts. China's official 2026 defence budget is $281 billion, a 7% year-on-year increase. Despite this, China has narrowed the qualitative gap in specific areas through hypersonic missile systems, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), nuclear warheads, and long-range stealth bombers, but the gap persists. Alliances can be a strategic vulnerability for an emerging hegemon. The US alliance network emerged largely from Cold War containment strategy deterring Soviet expansion, and later interventions such as the invasion of Afghanistan and various regime-change operations. This creates a web of formal treaty alliances: NATO and bilateral pacts with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines. China has no equivalent alliance structure; its regional influence instead flows through economic instruments, particularly Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure investment rather than combat operations; this pattern deliberately explains that China is not attempting to challenge the global status quo directly. Instead, it is pursuing a regional strategy building military and economic workarounds that strengthen its position across Asia without seeking to displace the broader structure of global hegemony

Cultural hegemony is the ability to project one’s own values, morals and culture as universal, not through coercion, but through soft power. Hollywood, pop music, consumer brands, English as the global lingua franca and American universities as the elite destination all carry as a subconscious framework of contemporary standards. While China is deliberately building a parallel infrastructure. Confucius Institutes and Belt and Road cultural diplomacy maintain its regional hegemony, but it fails to counter the global status quo. Much of its influence runs through economic entanglement (loans, infrastructure, tech) rather than genuine cultural attraction. US hegemony has made this the new normal and neutral. China isn't trying to replace it; it's building redundant channels, so it isn't dependent on US-dominated ones, especially in the Global South

Despite all the structural forces driving its rise, China's grand strategy avoids a direct challenge to the existing international order; instead, it is building a parallel architecture under an umbrella of the prevailing framework, where it gains acceptance as a regional sole controller who believes in regionalization as the new globalization, which sums up to some extent. But alibiing a system within the prevailing makes it less disruptive; this explains the fact that for a decade or two, the US will not lose its hegemonic status, but we can’t foresee or predict the delicacy of a catastrophic event that emerges with the new international order

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of The Himalayan Research Institute Pakistan (THRIP)

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Mahnur Asim is a research intern at the Himalayan Research Institute and a student of International Relations at Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan.