Рассматриваются труды современных американских историков, политологов и экономистов, представляющих «мозговые центры» США неолиберального и неоконсервативного толка. Первые развивают «великую» либеральную идею как основу политики Pax Americana с опорой на «мягкую» силу. Вторые отстаивают американские национальные интересы, опираясь на принципы Realpolitik и действия своей страны на международной арене с «позиций силы».

The authors of the article focus on the works of contemporary American historians, politicians and economists of neoliberal and neoconservative wings. The first develop the "great" liberal idea born during the war in times of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson as the basis of a one-polar world under the aegis of the USA with the support of "soft" power. The second stand for American national interests within the Pax Americana policy relying on the Realpolitik principle with the aim to present national interests of the USA on the international arena from the position of strength. The aim of the article is to track the evolutional change of ideological, military-political and economic paradigms of building the American world beginning with the interwar and afterwar ages till the present time. The change of these paradigms during this period happened not once and, as a rule, impulsively, which formed some typical paradoxes of the Pax Americana policy. These paradoxes, in their turn, provoked sharp interpolitical struggle within the American administration and caused broad academic discussions in the US think tanks. The article solves several main tasks: to reveal factors of local as well as foreign influence which conditioned paradoxical characteristics of the Pax Americana policy in the studied period. In the field of domestic policy these were mainly groups of interests within the "hard triangle" (the executive and legislative powers of the USA, American public opinion). Double game within the federal center and local administration of the country also played the role. The crisis and collapse of the policy of detente in the 1970s and the second period of the Cold war in the 1980s revealed the factors of outer influence connected with the complete destruction of the universal and institutional structures of postwar international relations. These processes were accompanied with growing economic, ecological, demographic, energetic and immigration problems causing the inception and development of international terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. All these seemed to open new ways of implementing the Pax Americana policy. However, after the end of the Cold war during the formation of the "new world order" in the 20th-21st centuries the American administration and academic circles did not succeed in reaching consensus between neoliberals and neoconservatives. In the inaugural speech on 20 January 2016 the republican President D. Trump officially proclaimed the slogan: "To give America to Americans back!" Taking into account the long chain of paradoxes of the American foreign policy in the past, one can theoretically assume the possible refusal of the USA to use the Pax Americana policy. It will certainly contribute to the deepening of the processes of the formation of a multipolar world in the future.