Kurdish Peace

On march 21, almost one million Kurds gathered in Diyarbakir to celebrate the Kurdish New Year, Newroz and listened to the message of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed PKK. In the midst of the cheers and applauses, Ocalan declared that the era of armed struggle for the Kurds ended and the PKK would lay down its arms.

The subject of American decline and the new global order has been on the agenda of political scientists and international observers for more than two decades. Even before the end of the Cold War, in 1989 Paul Kennedy in his seminal book on The Rise and Fall of Great Powers pointed to “imperial overstretch” and the national debt caused by increasing military expenditures as the major causes of the US’s decline in the coming decade.1 The US victory in the Cold War and the fall of communism in the world somewhat postponed these concerns and Kennedy’s predictions were overshadowed by the moment of unipolarity in world politics, in which the United States enjoyed unchallengeable military and political dominance. However, starting from the late 1990s, concerns grew about the future of the United States’ dominance in world politics as the Chinese economy’s growth accelerated.