I usually don't add much to the extended political thesis, mainly because of my short attention span and...Oh look, a butterfly.
...
Ok, now that the prerequisite cheap gag is out of the way, all I have to say is that this world, any world in fact, is far to complex an entity to effectively be categorized in a black and white manner, or in the case of the flavor of this thread, dominate or subordinate. There are pockets of individual nations and even alliances that spend their days neither seeking to dominate nor are they subordinate to the larger world around them.