Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sixteen years after the  United States  invaded  Iraq  and left a trail of  destruction and  chaos in the country and the region, one aspect of the war remains criminally underexamined: why was it fought in the first place? What did the Bush administration hope to get out of the war? ," asks Ahsen I Butt. Butt has tried to re-examine the motives of the U.S. in invading Iraq: " Put simply, the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to (re)establish American standing as the world's leading power." He has hit the nail once or twice, but he has not explored what this re-establishment of "the world's leading power" consists of. Nor does he he provide the historical conjuncture and context: the domestic sociology in the U.S., the continuation of 1991 invasion and the collapse of the Soviet Union and "globalisation".  Reviewing Andrew Bacevich's American Empire , Peter Gowan draws a much better picture of the motives behind the invasion of 200...

The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.  There is another version of cosmopolitanism abroad today, which places at the centre of its conception of a new world order the notion of a democratic global polity. This comes in a number of different editions, some scarcely distinguishable from liberal cosmopolitanism save for more voluble democratic piety. But in its most generous version, exemplified by Daniele Archibugi’s essay in these pages, this is a programme with the great merit of seeking to subordinate the rich minority of states and social groups to the will of a global majority, in conditions where the bulk of the world’s population remains trapped in poverty and powerlessness. Yet even its best proposals suffer from two crippling weaknesses. ...

"The most powerful states within the capitalist system have historically been the ones which establish the International Political Economy regimes of international capitalism and they establish rules which favour the expansion of their own capitalism."  —Peter Gowan 2005, an unpublished paper " Gabriel Hetland  (theguardian.com, 24 January) is right to highlight how US sanctions have aggravated the economic crisis in Venezuela, perhaps by deliberate policy. US actions follow a predictable pattern. Just over a year ago, another Latin American country riven by economic and social problems descended into widespread street protests and violence following a disputed election, with dozens of people killed by security forces. That country was impoverished Honduras, where the pro-US Juan Orlando Hernández was re-elected president in an election many, including the Organization of American States, saw as fraudulent. The US response that time was to support Hernández agai...

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 ...

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion