Politics & Power Quote by Benjamin Cohen

The anxiety here isn’t about chaos; it’s about competition. Cohen’s line turns “others controlled the course of their own development” into a quiet threat, as if autonomy itself were destabilizing. The phrasing is doing ideological work: it recasts self-determination by non-Americans as a structural risk to “the American system,” not just a policy challenge. That’s a tell. It implies the system’s health depends on other nations being constrained, guided, or at least predictable enough to fit inside an American-designed order.

The subtext is an old one in modern clothing: empire without the word. “Development” reads like economics and aid, but it’s really about leverage - who sets rules on trade, finance, technology, and resource flows; who writes the standards; who gets to industrialize without permission. The sentence assumes that if countries truly chose their paths, some would choose protectionism, state-led growth, non-alignment, alternative institutions, maybe even different political models. That pluralism, Cohen suggests, isn’t just inconvenient; it’s dangerous.

Context matters: early-1980s geopolitical and economic turbulence, when the U.S. faced stagflation’s hangover, Japan and Western Europe were rising, the Global South was pushing for a New International Economic Order, and Cold War alignment was still the frame. Read that way, Cohen is diagnosing a hegemon’s fear of a multipolar future. The line works because it’s bluntly self-revealing: it says the quiet part out loud about how “stability” often means other people’s limited choices.