The strongest argument to support the view that the current global political economy is different fronm its Bretton Woods predecessor is the diminished position of the United States’ rhegemony. The predominance of the United States was bought about as a matter of consequence, more than natural economic supremacy in light of the massive devastation in Western Europe (Cohn 2000, 363). Furthermore, the chronic balance of payments deficits that the US has held since 1971 serve as a further indication of hegemonic decline (Cohn 2000, 362). Although the liberal approach to IPE has at its core a set of principles for “organizing and managing a market economy in order to achieve maximum efficiency, economic growth, and individual welfare” (Gilpin 1987, 27) to which the US strongly adhered to in the aftermath of World War II, this is in stark contrast to the Bretton Woods conference. Indeed, its initial success was largely put down to the recognition that liberalization of markets brought negative effects and undermined the nation state (Moon 2005, 433). Nonetheless, it must also be acknowledged that the US retains a special position in the current global political economy. Indeed, the Washington Consensus, typified by the aggressive privatisation and deregulation by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, was widely used during the 1980s and 1990s in many South American countries (Phillips 2005, 332). Moreover, the US remains the dominant member in all of the Bretton Woods institutions in terms of their voting rights with the US dollar enduring as the main international currency (Cohn 2000, 362). Thus, one could argue that US hegemony may not have been in decline since Bretton Woods.

A further argument to support the idea that the current global political economy is different from the Bretton Woods system is the growing multipolarity of IPE and the rise of the Asian economies. The use of many economic unions such as the EU, ASEAN and NAFTA indicates that the realist