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Under George W. Bush, the United States (US) has revolutionized world politics by abandoning successful forms of hegemonic governance, based on the institutionalization of collective economic and security regimes, in favor of militarism—the pursuit of global domination through force. Starting from a critique of structuralist approaches, this paper examines the ideational transformation of the American Right and situates it within the context of the US’s emergence in 1991 as a unipolar strategic actor and as the core state in the newly globalized capitalist political economy. While these synchronous transformations considerably augmented US autonomy, giving the country an opportunity to reconfigure the world system to its advantage, a distinction must be made between the current imperial expansionism of the revived and expanded US national security state and earlier forms of US hegemonic rule. This accounts for a fundamental shift of the way in which the United States has governed the capitalist world system since 1945.