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This book explores America's decline as a global power, arguing that the implosion of Pax Americana was initiated by the process of globalization, preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union by nearly a decade. The era of Pax Americana, and with it American hegemony, is conclusively passed, and will not return in current global conditions. There is a stark contrast between the present epoch and the postwar era of American hegemony (1945-1979) in which the United States, at least outside of the Soviet sphere of influence, largely managed the international economy and reigned over international politics and relations. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical evidence, this book shows that the era of globalization unleashed forces--social, political, and economic--which broke down the status quo of American hegemony. Author Cyrus Bina also establishes that since the Iranian Revolution (1979), US involvement throughout the Middle East, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now notably in Ukraine has been motivated by the freefall of American hegemony and an attempt to get it back by direct or indirect military force. Bina utilizes these contexts for wider analysis and critique of a number of theories commonly used to analyze economy, polity, geopolitical, and dynamics of crisis and social change in capitalism. This book will be of great interest to students, academics, and policymakers on subjects of Economics, International Relations, Global Studies, International Political Economy, Political Geography, Sociology, and postwar History.

This paper aims to combine a critique of political economy with that of transnational polity in a unified theoretical foundation. It begins by (1) exploring the development of capitalism into stages, (2) showing that this should necessarily lead to globalization, and (3) validating that in the epoch of globalization no hierarchical interstate (hegemonic or not) political order may stand a chance for survival. These highly abstract theoretical queries, on the one hand, follow Karl Marx's critique of capitalism, and on the other hand obtain further theoretical and historical concretization in Antonio gramsci's hegemony, before their realization at observable levels via the rise and fall of the postwar Pax Americana (1945–1979). Marx's "conquest of mode of production" and gramsci's hegemony set the context for a synthetic approach to the rise and fall of American power. Finally, the force of globalization is the arbiter of time, despite the declining power syndrome, in this disjointed polity.

The modern oil industry is an outcome of a three-stage change in which the largest cartel in recent memory emerged secretly, thrived visibly, and collapsed onto itself just before the 1973-74 oil crisis. Iran was the first country in the Middle East where a colonial oil concession (D'Arcy, 1901) for the exploration and production of oil was signed. This paper focuses on Iran to unveil the toehold of the International Petroleum Cartel (1928-72) in economic/political terms, before theorizing the history of decartelization, oil rents, and the competitive globalization of the petroleum sector following the crisis of the early 1970s. This paper validates that, regardless of the ownership of deposits, the lessor is entitled to a differential oil rent and the lessee merely to a competitive profit, both of which are the effect of the globalization of oil. Oil contracts in the Islamic Republic are no exception.