>The economic interests of the United States are in direct opposition
>to those of both the EU and Japan. They have been in direct
>opposition for thirty years now and they will be even more in
>opposition during the next thirty.
>
>During the last thirty years, a period of global economic stagnation
>- and therefore of global high unemployment and primacy of financial
>speculation as a mode on ensuring profits - the Triad powers have
>been in a struggle to export unemployment to each other and to be
>the primary locus of speculative accumulation. Western Europe did
>best in the 1970's, Japan in the 1980's, and the United States in
>the 1990's. But the game goes on. And if the world-economy comes out
>of this stagnation into another productive expansion, the Triad will
>be in a competitive struggle to be the locus of the monopolies that
>will be the major beneficiaries of the expansion.
>
>Why have the media not noticed this? The media have concentrated on
>geopolitics to the detriment of observing the economic struggles.
>They have noticed that the EU and Japan have constantly given in to
>U.S. political pressure on questions such as the Gulf War, NATO
>expansion, and Kosovo. But they haven't noticed that, over the past
>thirty years, the EU and Japan have not given in on a single major
>economic issue (such as the Russian oil pipeline to western Europe,
>or the innumerable ways in which Japan limits access of U.S.
>corporations and banks to Japanese internal markets). And they
>weren't about to give in at Seattle about government subsidies to
>European farmers. The U.S. ran into a stone wall.
This seems a bit overstated. Sure there are tensions among the U.S., Japan, and the EU. But the G-7 powers have cooperated to a remarkable degree in making policy towards the Third World (or whatever we're supposed to call it these days). Their trade and investment ties have continued to deepen. Their central banks and finance ministries have cooperated in containing financial crises. U.S. political dominance of international politics and economics, despite bits of rockiness, has continued for the last 20 years. Sure the Triad powers have their spats now and then, but I think we're a lot closer to Kautsky's world than Lenin's. That could all change, but that's the way I see it now.
Doug