From the Editor

The year 2014 represents a major milestone for the Mediterranean Quarterly, which is celebrating its first twenty-five years of existence. With an inaugural issue published in the autumn of 1989, the journal has provided important policy prescriptions, thoughtful perspectives, and reasoned insights to its international readership. The world, and certainly the Mediterranean area, has changed significantly over the past quarter century. Yet at the same time it seems that many of the challenges that came to the forefront of academic and policy debate twenty-five years ago have still not been resolved, although the tenor of the debates has at least changed.

It is therefore perhaps fitting to look back at one of the major debates over the past quarter-century. In 1989, the famous book by the British historian Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, was still an international bestseller and had created quite a stir about the future of the United States in world affairs when it was published the year before. Most controversially, from the US perspective, Kennedy noted the following:

Although the United States is at present still in a class of its own economically and perhaps even militarily, it cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the “number one” position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of ever-shifting patterns of global production. . . . In consequence, the United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called “imperial overstretch”: that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.¹

Many decision makers in Washington took issue with this assessment—that the United States was in relative decline—and indeed they seemed vindicated by the events of November 1989 and after, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the United States’ primary rival, the Soviet Union, and the relatively quick victory of the US-led coalition in the first Gulf War. On a technological and economic level, the strong growth of the US information technology–based economy in the 1990s, combined with the unprecedented expansion of its economy, made the world’s remaining superpower one without peer. Indeed, the United States gradually appeared to itself and to much of the rest of the world as a so-called hyperpower.² The American conservative political commentator Charles Krauthammer famously called this the “unipolar” moment.

In 2014, twenty-five years later, however, Kennedy’s assessment may appear closer to reality. We are seeing an increasingly multipolar world, but with some of the same agents of international change still in place such as nationalism, terrorism, competition for natural resources, and religious extremism. Issues in and around the Mediterranean region over the past twenty-five years have brought the United States back to Earth from its lofty hyperpower perch of the late 1990s: the festering problems associated with the US military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the growth of anti-Western terrorist networks in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia; and the lack of political will to resolve some of the long-standing ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. The political opportunities currently presented by regional adversaries such as Iran are balanced by simmering instability of US regional allies Turkey and Egypt, while the Syrian civil war presents its own unique challenges. The need to address these and countless other difficult issues are the reasons why the Mediterranean Quarterly has endured over the past twenty-five years and will likely continue to do so in the future.

Several of the essays in the current issue...