Politics & Power Quote by Robert C. Solomon

Solomon’s line lands like a polite shrug aimed at a very European suspicion: that American power is basically a financial trick, propped up by the dollar’s starring role in trade, reserves, and debt. The cleverness is in the feigned innocence. “I just don’t see that connection at all” isn’t a neutral observation so much as a rhetorical move that forces the listener to prove the obvious. It’s the educator’s gambit: pretend confusion to expose how much of the argument rests on insinuation rather than mechanism.

The subtext is a critique of reductionism. “Hegemony” is a messy bundle of military basing, alliance systems, cultural reach, tech standards, intelligence networks, and the soft coercion of “rules-based” institutions. By isolating the dollar, Solomon implies Europeans are choosing a tidy villain - currency dominance - because it’s more discussable than the harder stuff: security dependence, postwar bargains, and America’s capacity to set defaults for what counts as normal.

Context matters. This is the late-20th-century/early-2000s moment when euro-optimism mixed with Iraq-era resentment and anti-globalization anxiety. Complaints about “dollar hegemony” often functioned as a way to talk about American influence without naming NATO, Hollywood, or Washington’s veto power in global finance. Solomon’s denial punctures that euphemism. He’s not proving the dollar is irrelevant; he’s highlighting how the “connection” argument can become a morally satisfying shortcut: if the dollar is the lever, then Europe can imagine changing the currency order as a cleaner path to autonomy than confronting the full architecture of American power.