THE REVENGE OF HISTORY
THE BATTLE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
SEUMAS MILNE
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1. Last Days of the New World Order
The rise of liberal interventionism (1999–2002)
Chapter 2. A Dragons’ Teeth Harvest
Wars on terror and tyranny (2001–02)
Chapter 3. Onslaught of Empire
Aggression, occupation and delusion (2002–05)
Chapter 4. In Thrall to Corporate Power
The high tide of neoliberal politics (1997–2008)
Chapter 5. Resistance and Reaction
The refusal to be subjugated (2004–08)
Chapter 6. Capital Meltdown
The crisis of the neoliberal order (2007–09)
Chapter 7. End of the Unipolar World
The limits of imperial power (2008–10)
Chapter 8. A Tide of Social Change
Latin America, China and twenty-first-century socialism (2003–12)
Chapter 9. Lords of Misrule
Elites unmasked and discredited (2009–12)
Chapter 10. Uprising and Hijacking
Arab revolt and the crisis backlash (2011–12)
Notes
Index
Copyright
In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order of unchallenged US global and economic power. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia. The former Soviet republic was a particular favourite of Washington’s neoconservatives. Its forces, armed and trained by the US and Israel, made up the third-largest contingent in the occupation of Iraq. Its authoritarian US-educated president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato, as part of the alliance’s eastward expansion up against Russia’s borders.
In an unblinking inversion of reality, US Vice-President Dick Cheney, echoed by Britain’s then foreign secretary David Miliband, denounced Russia’s response to Georgia’s onslaught as an act of ‘aggression’ that ‘must not go unanswered’. Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on the people of Iraq, George Bush declared Russia’s ‘invasion of a sovereign state’ to be ‘unacceptable in the twenty-first century’.
As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (as the Western powers had done in Kosovo a few months earlier). Russia ignored him and twenty-four hours later did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea, unable to land supplies at Georgian ports because of a risk of confrontation between US and Russian troops.1
The short-lived Russian–Georgian conflict marked an international turning point. The US’s bluff had been called, its military sway and credibility undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After the better part of two decades during which it had been able to bestride the world like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, the years of uncontested US power were over. Pumped up with petrodollars, Russia had called a halt to a relentless process of US expansion and demonstrated that its writ didn’t run in every backyard. The lesson was quickly absorbed across the world.
Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the very heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, days after the US government had been forced to take over the stricken mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the long-smouldering sub-prime-fuelled credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America’s fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered the greatest banking crash since 1929 and engulfed the Western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.
The first decade of the twenty-first century shook the international order to its foundations, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed, while socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to arguments about culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs. The market would settle the rest.
In 1990, George Bush Senior inaugurated what he hailed as a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and Western economic dominance.2 The end of the Soviet Union meant there would be no more second superpowers. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would, and did, bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. Force would only be deployed to police insubordinate rogue states in the name of human rights. History itself, it was even said, had come to an end.3
But between the assault on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001 and the fall of Lehman Brothers seven years later, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed in spectacular fashion, rejected across large parts of the world.
It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that paradoxically ended up undermining its own international authority and the sense of invincibility of the world’s first truly global empire. As a rule, terrorism in its proper sense – as opposed to popular armed resistance – isn’t just morally indefensible. It also doesn’t work, in the sense of achieving its own objectives. But the wildly miscalculated response of the Bush administration turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into perhaps the most successful terror attack in history.4
Not only did Bush’s war on terror fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the Muslim world and beyond, while its lawless savagery and campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping comprehensively discredited Western claims to be global guardians of human rights in the process. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that were its centrepiece – the latter on a flagrantly false pretext – also dramatically revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back.
That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies, paid for at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The demonstration of US military overreach, in Iraq in particular, strengthened the hand of those prepared to defy America’s will at both a regional and global level. Russia’s decisive response to Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia confirmed the shift and marked the end of unchecked US unilateralism.
This passing of the unipolar moment, driven home by the exposure of the limits to US power, was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world during the first ten years of the new millennium – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the financial crash of 2008 and the profound crisis