Even as the scale of failure became clear in Iraq, Bush and Blair intensified the military campaign in Afghanistan, now hailed as ‘the good war’ and even a ‘war for civilisation’. When British troops were sent to Helmand in 2006, the defence secretary John Reid told parliament he hoped they would leave ‘without a single shot being fired’. Four million rounds later, they were being killed at a faster rate than in Iraq, while Afghan civilians were dying in their thousands from Nato air attacks and the mushrooming conflict with the Taliban. As he wound down the Iraq occupation, Barack Obama would further escalate the Afghan war, spreading it to Pakistan with unrelenting drone attacks that left thousands dead. The war on terror continued to fuel terrorism across the Muslim world and in the states that waged it, while at the same time nurturing Islamophobia in Europe and North America. Afghanistan had become nothing more than a war to save Nato’s credibility.42
By then the crash of 2008 had engulfed the main occupying states, deepening popular pressure for withdrawal from exorbitant and unwinnable wars. The economic crisis not only cut the ground from under the market orthodoxy that had shaped politics for a generation, but rehabilitated state intervention overnight. By the scale of their bailouts to save the banking system, nationalisations and boosts in demand, governments gave an object lesson in what could in fact be done. After decades in which the market had been unchallenged, Keynes and Marx were back in fashion and the political and corporate elites destabilised.43
But as soon as the immediate threat had passed, pressure to restore the old order and shuffle off the costs of the slump rapidly turned a crisis of the market and the banks into a crisis of the state and public debt. Economic failure paved the way for Obama’s election and brought down one incumbent government after another across Europe, as the crisis took the currency union to the brink of implosion. In Britain, it drove Brown’s government in a more recognisably social-democratic direction, but the shift was too little and too late to staunch a haemorrhage of supporters. The Conservative-led coalition that succeeded it in 2010 would then impose an austerity programme to shrink the state and reorder society in the interests of those who had triggered the crisis – as a string of corruption scandals further discredited the elites and the country erupted into protests and riots.44
Revolt against the market orthodoxy that brought the Western world’s economies to their knees in 2008 had first emerged a decade earlier in Latin America in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998. It was Latin America’s experience of the privatisation, deregulation and pauperisation it unleashed across the region that opened the way for the election of progressive and radical governments from Venezuela to Brazil, Bolivia to Argentina in the first years of the new millennium. Not only did they begin to carve out the first truly independent South America for 500 years, but their radical social programmes, experiments in democratic participation and determination to bring resources under public control demonstrated there would be multiple economic and social alternatives in the twenty-first century.45
Latin America’s rejection of neoliberalism would be vindicated in the crisis of 2007–08, as would China’s ability to mobilise state-owned banks and enterprises to continue the expansion that had confirmed its unquestioned emergence as a global economic power in the new century. China’s explosive rise, which led to the largest-scale reduction in poverty in history, was also bought at the cost of large-scale and corrupt privatisation, the creation of a wealthy elite and a block on democratic advance. But by 2010, its vast cheap labour industrial export zones were being swept by successful strikes, while protests multiplied across rural areas – as the government boosted employment protection and signalled a shift back towards freer health and education.46 Which direction China and its hybrid economic model would take would evidently depend on social struggles and pressures, from above and below.47
That was also the lesson of the uprisings that erupted across the Arab world in the winter of 2010–11, triggered by the aftershocks of the economic crash of 2008. After two of their client autocrats were overthrown in quick succession by popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the Western powers and their Gulf allies moved to hijack, suppress or divert the revolutionary process. In Libya, Nato’s intervention delivered a new order founded on ethnic cleansing, torture and internment at a cost of an estimated 30,000 dead, while its leading states backed the crushing of opposition in Bahrain and other dependent dictatorships. The Saudi and other Gulf autocracies meanwhile fanned sectarianism to control or stifle revolts from Syria to Saudi Arabia, as the US and Israel ratcheted up the menace of war on Iran. In the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was clear that the US and its allies were still ready to use military power to control the region – but also that the forces unleashed across the Arab world, including the impulse for self-determination, would not easily be turned back.48
That was also true globally. More than a decade after 9/11 and the subsequent neoconservative onslaught, the US still maintained military forces in most countries from the heart of a global empire, waged war across the Muslim world and threatened states that defied its diktat. But its unilateral military power and credibility had been eroded, while China, Russia and Latin America had asserted their independence, expanding the political and economic options for weaker states in the process.
By the same token, Western governments and corporate interests were using the crisis to impose austerity, dismantle welfare and further extend privatisation, while insecurity and unemployment fuelled the growth of the far right. But the Washington consensus was discredited, the free market model in ruins, class politics was back and support for the radical left was growing – including in the heart of Europe. The spirit of Arab revolt had, meanwhile, inspired a global protest movement against the bailout of the richest 1 per cent, while across the globe rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a ‘sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall’, whose aftermath had led the world to ‘rediscover that capitalism is not the answer, but the question’.49 It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy in the late twentieth century, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no economic and social model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.
The same was true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy and society on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a collective and sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a fundamental shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions. The upheavals of the first years of the twenty-first century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order and of genuine social and economic change. But, as communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered twenty years later, nothing is ever settled.
Last Days of the New World Order
THE RISE OF LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM (1999–2002)
The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington did not come out of a clear blue sky, as was often said in the West at the time. They were the product of decades of US and Western support for client dictatorships across the oil-rich Middle East, sponsorship of Israeli occupation, war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the militarily enforced asphyxiation of Iraq. They also followed a decade of