>et the world has been here before. In the summer of 1940, after the
>fall of France, when Nazi Germany's determined drive to global
>dominance seemed unstoppable by any possible combination of forces.
Things are a bit different now. The U.S. is picking on small, weak countries. It's not marching into Poland or France. And its mechanisms of domination are often much subtler than blood & iron.
>In fact, as the nineties rolled on, it became clear that what the end
>of the Cold War ushered in was a volatile period more dangerous than
>the Cold War, when the superpower standoff warded off big wars,
>contained smaller wars, and gave relations among states a certain
>predictability.
We spent 40 years anxious about the possibility of nuclear war - that's not trivial. Nor were the hot wars of the cold war trivial - Korea, Vietnam, proxy wars in Lat Am and Africa.
>This intellectual failure is jarring, and it stems from a primordial
>belief that Washington, unlike other great powers, is not just
>motivated by naked realpolitik but by the desire for a benign global
>order as well. These ideological blinders prevent Mearsheimer and
>many other American intellectuals from appreciating the fact that the
>US has switched its role from that of being an "offshore balancer"
>against would- be hegemons like Hitler and the former Soviet Union to
>being itself an aggressive power bent on achieving world hegemony.
I thought the U.S. more or less had that hegemony, and the question was how eroded or dispersed it had become or is becoming.
>Many critics of US power, for their part, attribute George W. Bush's
>unilateralism to the self-centered, provincial worldview of the
>American right. This explanation confuses cause and effect. Bush's
>unilateralist ideology is a product of a unique structural
>conjuncture: the consolidation of the civilian-military "defense
>establishment" that won the Cold War as the dominant faction of the US
>elite and the disappearance of an effective countervailing force to US
>power in the global state system.
That countervailing power disappeared more than 10 years ago. if "objective forces" were the real driving force, wouldn't they have appeared earlier? Why would all the right-wing hawks now in power have spent the Clinton years lobbying for and planning for their New American Century?
I like and admire Walden, but does he know much about the American right? How contemptuous they have long been of the UN and Europe as nests of pansies? Of their religious certainty and lust for holy war? This move against Iraq didn't spring from the establishment, like the CFR; it came from the right, which took power with Bush. Of course, the U.S. president has enormous power to set agendas and drag everyone else along. But the admin has had to do some dragging, even at home.
>Then there is the burgeoning global movement against corporate- driven
>globalization, which has, in the last year and a half, fused with the
>anti-war movement to form a powerful anti-US front at the level of
>international civil society.
Anti-US? I thought it was anti-capital, and anti-US only insofar as the US is the top capitalist enforcer. And what about the global justice/antiwar movement here? Are we chopped liver?
Doug