Pointing to a long historical record, they argued that failure is the fate of hegemons. The hegemonic bids of the Habsburgs (under Charles V and Philip II), France (under Louis XIV and Napoleon), and Germany (under Wilhelm II and Adolph Hitler) were all defeated by the resistance of countervailing alliances, and by the consequences of their own strategic overextension. In a unipolar world, the unipolar pessimists argued, the United States would not be immune from this pattern of hegemonic failure. Layne, C., 2012. This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana. International Studies Quarterly, 56(1), pp.2