“U.S. imperialism is currently the most aggressive geopolitical force, openly coercive, and deploying military and economic instruments with diminishing restraint. What links its resurgence to the present state of the world economy? How is geopolitical turmoil connected to capitalist reproduction at a time when productive accumulation has slowed to a crawl in the historic core of global capitalism, while financial capital continues to expand and fuel speculation? “ The preceding analysis of contemporary balance-sheet imperialism converges on a single structural paradox, namely, the U.S. share of global manufacturing (value added) has fallen from roughly half in 1945 to just over 16–17 percent today, while the dollar’s share of allocated official reserves has slipped only slightly below 60 percent. U.S. monetary and financial dominance is accompanied by the demise of its productive primacy. Meanwhile, U.S. multinational enterprises remain pre-eminent and rely on the global functi...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51