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Humble Grand Strategy

Ed McNally on Patrick Porter, False Promise of Liberal Order. An assault on the theory and practice of the ‘rules-based international system’.

Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management

NATO’s twin dynamics—eastward expansionism within Europe, aggregated military operations outside—have brought it to the brink of a major international war, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what is Washington’s real interest in the Alliance? Grey Anderson provides a sweeping historical analysis of a key instrument of American hegemony.

American Decline?

Predictions of American decline have multiplied over the past half-century, in tandem with the country’s expanding world power. Marco D’Eramo balances the strengths of a novel mode of dominion—military, financial, digital, diplomatic—against growing domestic strains levied by political deadlock and economic globalization.

After Waterloo

Why the Restoration of 1815, sealed in Vienna by Emperor, Tsar and King, brought not the longed-for return to the past but the arrival of a novel form of inter-state relations—presaging the birth of the ‘international community’.

On Shinzo Abe’s Japan

Headline-grabbing economic and monetary reforms read as smokescreens for a hardening of Japanese foreign policy, with Washington’s partial support. Incompatible mythologies of legitimation in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing, presaging insoluble tensions for the region.

A Monument to Himself

Anders Stephanson on George Kennan’s Diaries. Reflection and self-flagellation from the strategist of the Cold War.

Annexations

After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.

Dispensing Global Justice

Protector of the weak or tool of the strong? Origins and evolution of the International Criminal Court, and its geopolitical tacking through a decade of imperial warfare.

Consilium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

Imperium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

The Toughness Crew

Anders Stephanson on Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome. American foreign policy from Wilson to Obama, through the spectacles of Niebuhrian realism.

Decline of the West?

Mired in recession at home, pledged to perpetual warfare on the periphery—in what shape is the global sheriff? Régis Debray draws up a balance sheet of its vital symptoms.

Imperial Archipelagos

While China’s maritime aspirations have been widely criticized, little attention has been paid to the UN compact that guarantees Western imperial powers exploitation rights over vast expanses of the world’s oceans.

Another Turn Of The Screw?

Beneath the roiling surface of the Euro-crisis, a further chapter of the EU integration project is underway. Susan Watkins on the institutional machinery Berlin is imposing across the Union, and the political stakes—and hypocrisies—laid bare by the struggle.

The European Vortex

Global economic turmoil has exposed the structural flaws in the single currency. Amid deepening divergences between industrial north and debt-laden south, Michel Aglietta assesses the Eurozone’s chances of recovery, and the impact of its continued travails on the world economy.

Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis

The triple crisis—of Western hegemony, of capital and of the nationstate form—within which the Arab uprisings of 2011 have unfolded, and longer-run history of Anglo-American strategies for containing popular aspirations to sovereignty.

Tailors to the Emperor

Origins of the Bush doctrine in the thought of Albert Wohlstetter. Preemptive war and constant militarism as outcomes of a vision geared to gaining the tactical edge—but blind to the historical record of us foreign policy and incapable of strategic thought.

The North Atlantic Counsel

Profile of the conflict-instigation NGO, International Crisis Group. Tom Hazeldine follows the parallel courses of its Atlanticist advocacy and of Western military aggressions, from the Balkans to Mesopotamia.

President of Cant

From declamations in Cairo to silence over Gaza, occupation of Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tariq Ali asks what has changed in us foreign policy since the departure of Bush.

European?

A former MEP discusses the actual workings of the Europarliament, and the realities of ‘European construction’ in the realm of culture. What have been the outcomes of efforts to build a continental political identity?

The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty

What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Repeatedly invoked to choke off emergent nuclear powers in East Asia and the Middle East, the NPT’s actual content has remained largely undiscussed. Norman Dombey itemizes the Treaty’s provisions, and the asymmetrical burdens imposed on signatories, the better to gauge its successes and limitations.

Twilight of the NPT?

Responding to Dombey, Peter Gowan asks why such an unequal treaty has attracted so many adherents—and why its superpower beneficiary has sought to undermine it. Do impasses around the NPT signal failures for US dominance?

News from Nowheresville

Gopal Balakrishnan on Parag Khanna, The Second World. Globe-trotting account from beyond the OECD, surveying the stakes in a coming battle between ascendant China and a West caught in imperial doldrums.

Contesting the Peninsula

Heightened insecurity and inequality as outcomes of a decade of centre-left rule in South Korea. Can neoliberalism advance further across the ROK’s shifting political terrain, as a newly elected President’s popularity crumbles in face of public resentment?

Sovereign Impunity

Alberto Toscano on Danilo Zolo, La giustizia dei vincitori: Da Norimberga a Baghdad. A Florentine legal scholar traces the postwar development of a system of punitive international law, and its 1990s deployment by the West to impose ‘victors’ justice’.

Afghanistan: Mirage of the Good War

Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.

Atlantic Ideologies

Kees van der Pijl on Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Traditions of pragmatic flexibility as explanation for the ascendancy of the Anglosphere—and basis for a coming realignment of US foreign policy?

Simplicissimus

Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.

Jottings on the Conjuncture

A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.

Prisons of the Stateless

Charged in 1951 with defending rights of asylum, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has been recast for an age of humanitarian warfare. From Operation Provide Comfort to Bosnia and the Rwandan massacres—a compliant advocate of repatriation at any cost.

Strategy after Bush

Achin Vanaik on Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice. Clinton’s grey eminence ponders the hegemon’s next moves. What changes are required for imperial strategy to remain the same?

A Radical Realist

Peter Gowan on Christopher Layne, Peace of Illusions. A maverick mole inside realist international-relations theory, overturning orthodox accounts of US global strategy.

Imperial doxa from the Berlin Republic

Benno Teschke on Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Can an ideal-type for empire be deduced from a historical sociology of Han, Persian, Roman, Ottoman and US models? Prescriptions from Berlin for a second-tier European Empire.

Mid-Point in the Middle East?

As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.

A Lockean Europe?

Liberalization and its discontents seen in the longue durée—the struggle of late-coming statist contenders against an Anglophone heartland, now subsuming Europe in its Lockean embrace. Kees van der Pijl tracks the removal of macro-economic questions from democratic decision-making as central precondition for the EU’s neoliberal turn.

States of War

Reflections on the challenge of Afflicted Powers, from the Retort collective. How is America’s forward policy since 9/11 best explained, and what does it tell us about the nature of the inter-state system today? Has the age of Great Power rivalry passed, and if so, what kind of geopolitical order is replacing it? Capital, spectacle and war in the vortex of the Middle East.

Hegemony Unravelling-2

In the conclusion to his major two-part essay on the new US imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi situates the contradictions of the current American ‘spatial fix’ for the problems of overaccumulation in the context of a longue durée of systemic cycles. Have Washington’s attempts to secure its world role through the invasion of Iraq instead hastened the rise of China?

Hegemony Unravelling-1

In the first part of a major engagement with David Harvey’s New Imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi sets out the interlocking dynamics, spatial and temporal, of capitalist development and imperialism. Should US difficulties in Iraq and the ballooning current-account deficit be read as symptoms of a deeper-lying crisis, a shift from hegemony to dominance presaging the rise of a new East Asian challenger?

American Lebensraum

Peter Gowan on Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. The neglected career of a key thinker of American expansionism, and his scenarios for a world order after the age of European imperial dominance.

The Myth of Anglophone Succession

How far are the systems of British and American international power historically comparable? Can the imperium presided over by Clinton and Blair be regarded as essentially a sequel to the Victorian order guided by Palmerston or Salisbury, or does it represent something quite new—the first true hegemony in history?

US : UN

The American origins of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and the duality of US usages and conceptions of it ever since: from the Cold War through the collapse of the USSR to today’s war on terror and occupation of Mesopotamia.

Algorithms of War

The theoretical structure of the most ambitious projection of the American empire to date, and its political attachment to the Clinton Presidency. History and strategy, rhetoric and realities, in Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles.

Instruments of Empire

Peter Gowan on Andrew Bacevich, American Empire. A clear-eyed colonel examines the swords and deeds of the us state in the post-Cold War world.

Re-Colonizing Iraq

The American expedition to Baghdad, and world-wide reactions to the new imperium. From mass demonstrations against the war to the diplomatic hypocrisies colluding with it. The UN as framework of blockade and intervention yesterday, and mask of reconstruction tomorrow.

A Calculus of Power

John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics disdains liberal-imperial rhetoric for a tough-minded theory of ‘offensive realism’. Peter Gowan argues that, whatever its merits, the behaviour of states in the international system cannot be dissociated from the internal dynamics of the political orders they protect.

Internationalism: a Breviary

The metamorphoses of nationalism and internationalism, from the time of Kant to the ‘revolution in military affairs’. Social bases, ideological forms, geopolitical locations.

Demos and Cosmopolis

As representative democracy spreads it is steadily thinning: the nation-states that have been its traditional framework are losing much of their power. Popular sovereignty can only be recovered, Daniele Archibugi argues, in a cosmopolitan order antithetical to its simulacrum in the ‘international community’ of today.

After America?

Peter Gowan on Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver: Chaos and World Governance. Plotting the different axes of any international hegemony, and the prospects for American supremacy in the new century.

Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism

A reigning doctrine of international relations proclaims that, despite everything, the world is entering a new epoch of hopeful cosmopolitanism—narrow state sovereignty being overcome by the common and, where necessary, armed resolve of a ‘Pacific Union’ of democratic nations. What then of the asymmetric hegemony of the United States?