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Peter Gowan's Review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

A page from imperialist domination and continuity 
 Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review ( Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09 ), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain. I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East. "Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large." John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role
End of the Neoliberal Era? I have selected some key points in an article by David Kotz. [I]f accumulation and profit rates have not been stellar, in some respects neoliberalism was much better for capital than the previous economic regime, in directing a far greater flow of wealth to the capitalist class. By  2010, neoliberalism had returned in the guise of austerity policy. The misery and insecurity of the Great Recession helped to fuel unexpected political developments— a rise of right-wing nationalism and renewed support for some kind of ‘democratic socialism’.  The current structural crisis has taken the form of stubborn stagnation despite unprecedented monetary stimulus, with slow economic growth, a low rate of capital accumulation, stagnating real wages and worsening economic insecurity for working people— conditions that have helped to produce new political polarizations. The main features of post-war [WWII] capitalism in the advanced economies are well known. The sta
Creating a role model A more powerful weapon against "Islamic fundamentalism"?  An Arab-American leading "a global emancipatory feminist movement"
Neoliberal capitalism in Turkey There is a comparison with trade union rights in the EU. Neoliberal capitalism has undermined trade union bargaining power significantly in the US and the EU. In countries like Turkey or Egypt the situation for the labour movement is worse. It has been a "war" by capital globally, and that's why the French Renault in Turkey can get away with it or Perfetti Van Melle in Bangladesh ignores the rights of workers to form a union. In the case of Turkey, especially after the failed coup, workers have sided with Erdogan. Note that Turkey being the country with the highest numbers of journalists incarcerated/persecuted in the world was well-known to "the free world" and "the international community" before the coup, but  Turkey, like Saudi Arabia, has its own role to play within the global and regional dynamic of capital accumulation and a balance of forces within US hegemony. Erdogan's war on workers
"Wood’s narrative pokes a finger in the eye of most pat thinking on the subject by trying not to center Putin in its analysis. Putin of course still dominates the book, though not in the same cartoon supervillain style that predominates in most political writing today. But Wood is at pains to stress that he is simply one part of a larger system of oligarchic authoritarianism inherited not from Communism but the Boris Yeltsin years, when the ex-Soviet Union was buried under a mass of radical neoliberal reforms that spread grinding misery throughout the country and left it a shriveled husk of what it had been before 1991." Russia beyond supervillain
I was shocked, devastated and appalled upon hearing that  Britain continued seeking arms deals with Saudi Arabia in weeks after Khashoggi was mudered I couldn't believe it. How could that happen? It must be a conspiracy by The Mirror and The Independent! 
One of the early books that fundamentally changed my thinking were by Syrian writers. One of them was the original Arabic version of  This review was written 4 years before the appearance of the English translation.
"The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices." —Charles Péguy