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International relations (IR) scholars have traditionally viewed military alliances as vehicles, serving to ensure the states' survival under anarchy and to maintain the balance of power essential for the systemic stability. At the same time, alliances that include a dominant state are often employed by the latter as the means of attaining its core objectives and the tools of legitimizing its extraordinary might and ambitious policies. Apparently, this situation favors ambiguity and uncertainty in terms of developing proper theoretical understanding of the nature of alliances as the core institutions, which pattern the states' interactions, sustain international order, and ensure smooth functioning of the power relations. Seeking to elaborate more comprehensive approach to studying "asymmetric alliances" as the tools of both wielding the dominant state's influence and legitimizing its preeminence, the paper engages the insights borrowed from the theory of structuration that helps overcome methodological limitations conditioned by dual understanding of "power" as either "attribute" or "relationship". Specifically, the paper examines the United States' "asymmetric alliances" in Europe and East Asia as distinct social structures, comprised of "resources" and "rules" that sustain practices of U.S. engagement in regional affairs so as to ensure reproduction of inequitable relationships between the allies and to legitimize the United States' hegemony. This approach allows to reach more integrative understanding of the role of these alliances as the tools of Washington's influence and the means of reproduction of the inequitable relationships between the allies, as well as to identify contradictions inherent in these hierarchical arrangements, engendered by growing tension between "resources" and "rules" involved in the process of wielding and legitimizing the "American power".

Empires are normally referred to such forms of direct rule that rely primarily on violence and coercion. These features lead to permanent lack of political legitimacy and make imperial polities vulnerable to various sorts of resistance and contestation. In international politics, fragility of "imperial" legitimacy is exacerbated by persistence of "anarchy" as omnipresent condition, characterized by the absence of supreme authority beyond the nation-states' borders. Similar concerns are normally articulated by international relations scholars regarding the so-called "American empire", which rests upon highly inequitable relations between the U.S. and its "clients", "satellites" and "semi-sovereign protectorates" scattered across the globe. While conventional accounts consider these arrangements as based primarily on illegitimate relations of crude dominance, this article examines the "American empire" rather as legitimizing vehicle of the United States' post-Cold War power than the tool of serving Washington's needs. To this purpose, the author engages theoretical insights of A. Giddens' "structuration theory" and explores the United States' "empire" as a structure of domination, relying on sharp asymmetry of material and positional resources, and the rules, which assign legitimate capacities and set the standards of appropriate behavior. In doing so, the author seeks to overcome shortcomings of the existing approaches, which consider "social structures" as the means of either attaining collective goals or building the U.S.-led imperial order. After all, the paper demonstrates how structural properties of the "American empire" serve to organize practices of subordination and intervention as legitimate patterns of the relationships between Washington and its "clients" and "satellites" in the world periphery.

Front Matter /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Introduction /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- What is Materialism? /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Materialism of the Ancient World /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Modern Materialism /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Empiriocriticism /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Dialectical Materialism /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Empiriomonism /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- The Science of the Future /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- From Religious to Scientific Monism /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Bibliography /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley -- Name Index /Alexander Bogdanov and David G. Rowley.