"America's Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail:
Current US Megalomania Is Rooted in the Puritan Colonists' Certainties"
Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian (UK)
Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era
with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001.
The
first is its position of international domination, outside
the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold
war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony
no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large
though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative
decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global
manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is
rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older
imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed
industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter
of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international
game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries,
and the financial strength of the state rests on the
continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain
an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.
The influence of the
American economy today rests largely on the heritage of the
cold war: the role of the US dollar as the world currency,
the international linkages of US firms established during
that era (notably in defence-related industries), the
restructuring of international economic transactions and
business practices along American lines, often under the
auspices of American firms. These are powerful assets, likely
to diminish only slowly. On the other hand, as the Iraq war
showed, the enormous political influence of the US abroad,
based as it was on a genuine "coalition of the willing"
against the USSR, has no similar foundation since the fall of
the Berlin wall. Only the enormous military-technological
power of the US is well beyond challenge. It makes the US
today the only power capable of effective military
intervention at short notice in any part on the world, and it
has twice demonstrated its capacity to win small wars with
great rapidity. And yet, as the Iraq war shows, even this
unparalleled capacity to destroy is not enough to impose
effective control on a resistant country, and even less on
the globe. Nevertheless, US dominance is real and the
disintegration of the USSR has made it global.
