This statement was published in 1995, i.e. before the wars and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and before the destructive legacies left behind after the American forces withdrew from the two countries, the Arab uprisings and the war in Syria, the NATO ‘intervention in Libya, and of course the ongoing invasion of Ukraine – a proxy war in fact. In addition to the exacerbated ecological degradation, rise in global inequality and social insecurity and precarity, etc. I am convinced, for example, that capitalism cannot deliver world peace. It seems to me axiomatic that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism – and at the moment its most aggressive and adventurist organizing force, the government of the United States – is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace. Nor do I think that ca...
“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