This program plus Christianity was imposed on periphery countries, and justified the center intervening and disrupting traditional structures to lay the foundations for the eventual transformation of those countries. This theory was flawed from the start, since to bring about an economy based entirely on market relations required the state using a great deal of force, as the colonies would soon find out. The market in fact negates the more noble characteristics associated with liberalism, as devastatingly illustrated by the historic liberal victory—the repeal of the Corn Laws in ironically, by Tory prime minister Robert Peel —where a freed market economy was a major factor in the mass starvation and emigration of Irish peasants.
This mindset justified and still justifies the invasion and even colonization of Muslim lands in order to modernize them in line with the imperial agenda.
The role of ideology in the games is subtle. It is the water we swim in, the air we breathe, without fully realizing what we are doing, the thought-equivalent of the autonomic functioning of the nervous system. The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? A neutral observer can step back from the complex interactions of the players and posit the underlying rules of GGI and with variations all the games: 1.
Wars by powerfully armed, technologically advanced countries are condoned against innocent natives, who are unaware of concepts of private property, and have neither standing armies nor advanced armaments. Exceptionalism means that Britons, Americans and those serving the empire are not accountable for their actions, including murder and theft.
German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz argued that strategy a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal belongs primarily to the realm of art, while tactics the actions taken to execute the strategy belong primarily to the realm of science. At the same time he plotted with a pretender to the throne against the Nawob and, conspiring with the leading Hindu merchant, deposed the Nawob, securing first Bengal and then further territories for the East India Company and indirectly for the British government.
He promptly instituted a tax system on the natives to pay for the export of their textiles to England essentially free of charge. Such legal-financial and military-political strategies and tactics and variations on them have been used in all the games, always draped in humanitarian and civilizing garb. Britain was the main empire in GGI and its strategy was, as rimland, to contain the heartland German and Russian empires, and keep the other major rimland power—the budding US empire—in alliance with it.
The US in GGI was more modest in its ambitions, more concerned with keeping the other imperial powers out of the American continent, considering any interference there to be an act of aggression as expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, though this did not preclude the US from seizing faraway south Asian islands, especially Hawaii and the Philippines and importing slaves from Africa and indentured labor from China.
Financial Strategies Traditional imperialism was based on the gold standard and mercantilism—the center amassing gold from the periphery either through direct theft or trade.
London was the banking center that ensured the pound as international reserve currency based on gold. The decline of piracy and the improvement in ocean safety which the British navy provided, plus the gold standard, allowed trade and production and thus surplus extraction around the world to expand rapidly.
The system of national banks regulated by independent central banks19—a GGI innovation by the now powerful international banking elite—allowed effective coordination among all the financial elites of various empires through their central bankers.
As the national empires grew and economic relations became ever more cross-border, reliance on international banks, acting independently of governments, became greater. Britain did not bother to invade many other less strategic countries, especially in South America, to protect private bondholders. By the outbreak of WWI, though Britain may still have ruled the waves, its loss of financial hegemony21 was ultimately more telling than maintaining a superior military might and even control of the known sources of oil.
The international bankers, who enjoyed the protection of the British crown around the world, were well aware that the British government was virtually bankrupt by the outbreak of WWI. They were already focusing on the US and were able to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to sign the US Federal Reserve Act in , putting money creation in the US in the hands of private bankers rather than of government,22 as it was already in Britain, France and Germany.
These GGI central banks were already moving towards the financial endgame of imperialism—the creation of a world system of financial control in private hands, coordinated by them. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. But this could not continue forever.
Also rent. The resulting infrastructure, owned nominally by the, say, British, investors was actually being built on the expropriated surplus of the periphery recirculated via international banks, and of course by cheap periphery labor.
The positive side of this is that, in many cases, there was substantial development during GGI in the colonies. Furthermore, being a British colony especially a dominion, where the economy was directly administered by British officials made loans cheaper and provided preferential tariffs.
Given sufficient capital investment, access to new technology, migration and ethnic cleansing of the natives , responsible administration even if tilted to imperial interests meant low corruption, and a colony could truly develop as did Canada and Australia, for example. Under the influence of British-Russian intrigues, from the s on, both Central Asia and the Middle East, too, modernized somewhat. Reforms came from the top—the westernized Young Turks achieved a constitutional monarchy in the Ottoman Caliphate and introduced educational reforms.
Under British occupation, Egypt experienced much improved administration and rapid economic development despite the need to pay off the excessive national debt. Under Russian and subsequent Soviet rule, Turkestan got railways, established a modern education system, and developed large-scale farming. Under British prompting, Afghan emirs and King Amanullah Khan attempted minimal reforms and improved relations with the West. The latter faced fierce resistance, and he was deposed in by Nadir Khan with British support, leaving Afghanistan largely untouched by western influence until the s.
The British gamble in WWI was that it would win quickly and make up any losses by seizing German colonies and most of the Ottoman territories. The world currency was already no longer the pound, and the financial center for the world was already no longer London, despite the British victory. When it was finally forced to abandon the gold standard in , it effectively ceded its imperial status to the US, which by then controlled more gold and had far fewer military expenses.
The bankrupt caliphate was a useful cover for the British imperial advance into Egypt in ; officially, it was there not as an occupying power, but merely to support the local government and ensure compliance with international financial obligations.
Britain invaded Afghanistan twice during the nineteenth century, giving rise to the term Great Game. The Russian army had subdued Central Asia, or Turkestan, including the Emirate of Bukhara, and the khanates of Khiva and Kokand in —73, exploiting differences between them, driving Persia out of the region. However, in the Levant, now called the Middle East, Britain faced increasing problems. In the nineteenth century, without any significant empire, but with a national economic protectionist policy supporting its industry, Germany quickly outpaced Britain in economic growth.
This prompted Germany to seek its own empire—and source of oil—via the German-financed and German-built Berlin-Baghdad railway, the first leg of which opened in , reaching Konia in Anatolia. Oil deposits had been discovered near Baghdad, and Germany had no oil of its own. Though Germany tried to convince Britain and France to join in the ambitious project, which was beyond the financial resources of Germany alone, it was seen as a threat to British hegemony in the region, in particular, to the Suez Canal as the chief transport corridor to the empire in India and southeast Asia and Persian oil.
Instead of reaching a modus vivendi with Germany and creating a peaceful winwin situation, Britain pursued a policy of containment of Germany and intrigue. Referring to the German railway, British military adviser R. German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. Britain established the Triple Entente by , and used the next seven years to prepare to destroy its only real threat at that time on the continent.
With this solid imperial core, the rest of the world would come into line either as friend or subordinate. British bases and colonies around the world were to ensure its control of trade, natural resources and labor power in its vast world colonial network.
To some extent this was realized by when Britain presided over a new League of Nations. After WWI, rather than turning the Ottoman territories into fully fledged colonies, the soft power strategy of co-opting local elites was used. France was given Syria, Lebanon and the Maghreb. In the Middle East, the British government was at the same time grooming Islamists,28 attempting to create a pro-British pan-Islamic movement as part of its plans to control the region.
From —90, it supported Persian-Afghan Islamic activist and Freemason Jamal Uddine al-Afghani, credited with laying the intellectual foundation for conservative quietist political Islam. Figure 1. Colonel T. Lawrence incited the former to blow up the German-Turkish railroad during WWI with the promise of liberation of the Levant from the Turks, which was betrayed in the infamous Sykes—Picot Agreement of When the Hashemites were overpowered by the Saudis in Arabia, the British offered them the consolation prize of the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq, keeping both sides happy, and at the same time enemies—win-win for the British.
Control of world resources Even as Britain preened itself as master of the world following WWI, the prize of GGI—control of world resources—was already slipping from its hands.
Even as the British General Strike tore the country apart in , its economic elite was planning for the new American ascendancy. Britain and France were left bankrupt and their youth dead, maimed or traumatized. A semblance of British imperial glory remained through the s due to inertia, but the war had turned the common people against the empire. Several short-lived Labour governments began the long process of moving towards a post-imperial order.
In Russia, this happened even before WWI had ended, in a much more dramatic way. The war led to the overthrow of the Russian empire by the communists, who electrified the world, inspiring a strong socialist movement bent on dismantling empire everywhere, sowing the seeds of GGII—the fight against communism. Germany was reduced to a humiliated periphery country, which barely escaped communist revolution.
The competing empires Britain, France, would-be Germany and the would-not-be US, and their financial and industrial elites, together played a cruel and cynical game of brinkmanship through the s.
A French-Soviet mutual assistance pact in and a short-lived socialist government in France in briefly entertained the idea of a military alliance with the Soviet Union against Germany, but this unraveled quickly under British pressure. Many western enterprises were doing business with the Soviet Union as well.
Their concern was not so much to support any political ideology, but to make profit and promote their own interests in these rising powers, no matter who emerged on top. For western big business, neither fascism nor communism was a problem. The long term goals of American politicians and capitalists, however, did coincide on other important issues. The glorious pomp hiding the cruelty and inhumanity of GGI is best epitomized by the figure of Winston Churchill, a swashbuckling romantic who saw military action in British India, participating in the slaughter of Afghan Pashtuns, who were angry that Britain had stolen half of their lands as part of its Great Game with Russia.
He gained fame and notoriety as an adventurer, rhetorician, adventurer and sybarite, and eventually during WWII murderer on a mass scale, who never had second thoughts about the imperial project until it collapsed under his feet. The Russian revolution was the logical outcome of the imperialism of competing empires, bankrupting themselves in senseless wars and exploiting the periphery countries, creating famine and horrors too numerous to list here. Imperial greed at the WWI peace conference in Versailles and throughout the post-WWI period both created the Nazi monster and unwittingly gave succor to the Soviet attempt at spearheading a postimperial order, resulting in a totally new Great Game, GGII—united empires against communism.
The term Great Game took on a new meaning, used by the Nazis to refer to the war against the communists and their plan to sign a separate peace with Britain and the US. That it was the logical extension of the original Great Game is confirmed by the fact that most of the top Nazis were employed by the US after the war, especially those who already had experience in this new Great Game.
The imperialists provided arms and food aid to the communists and more or less sat back and watched as the communists defeated fascism, ending the Nazi dream of a thousand-year German Reich. The US once again emerged stronger than ever from a world war, and was able to discard its communist ally without a thought, and dictate the rules for the former empires against the anti-empire in the new game GGII.
Marx did not use the term, referring only to world capitalism. It was coined in the s and popularized by Hobson and later Lenin. See E. Table of British territorial acquisitions in J. Hobson, Imperialism, 3d ed.
By Britian governed million subjects, France 65 million, the Netherlands 70 million, and the US 15 million. Available at:. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, The repeal marked, also ironically, the beginning of the gutting of the British economy, both agriculturally and industrially, as imports began to take the place of local production. In this respect, the logic of liberalism and empire follows a similar path for both British and US empires in all phases of the Great Games— the zealous promotion of free trade led in both cases to deindustrialization of the domestic economy and bankruptcy of the government as production shifted to cheaper offshore colonies outsources and as the expenses of military control of the empire increased beyond sustainable limits.
Or is it instead that imperialism, once in motion, exerts a momentum of its own? As this work was going to press, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, in power for 30 years, was overthrown in a popular uprising, showing how tenuous the imperial order is, despite its appearance of invincibility. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, William Engdahl, A Century of War, Until recently, there were two others: Afghanistan and Iraq. Engdahl, A Century of War, The British Mandate of Mesopotamia was established in present-day Iraq by the League of Nations following WWI when Britain imposed the Hashemite monarchy of Faisal I on Iraq in and defined its territorial limits without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country.
During the British occupation, the Shia and Kurds fought for independence. Nominal independence was only achieved in , when the 27 28 British Mandate officially ended, but it had been created according to divideand-conquer, from 3 disparate vilayets Sunni, Shia and Kurd , and unpopular King Faisal, with no legitimate claim, was made nominal head of state.
British prospectors discovered oil in During World War I, the country was occupied by British and Russian forces but was essentially neutral. In , after the Russian revolution and withdrawal, Britain attempted to establish a protectorate in Iran, which was unsuccessful. Persian nationalism had achieved a bona fide Constitution in An ambitious officer, Reza Khan, carried out a coup in and crowned himself Shah, establishing the Pahlavi dynasty and ruled until deposed by the British in when the British and Soviets occupied Iran, suspecting the Shah of German sympathies and anxious to secure oil supplies.
The British put his yrear-old son Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne. As popular understanding has evolved in the West, however, it has become a synonym for terrorist or anti-American. The term here is used to indicate a politicized Islam, a process that, while it indeed was actively encouraged by British politicians and later American ones to serve their imperial aims, was taken up by Muslims who were not mere imperial satraps but rather pursuing their own agenda, seeking to remove foreign occupations from Muslim lands and re-institute Islamic politico-legal institutions to fully restore the Islamic way of life.
In the Islamic world, the term is open to a range of interpretations, and has been applicable to intellectuals and professionals as well as the popular masses.
A quietist non-political Islam financially endowed by the government of Saudi Arabia as opposed to private Saudi support for its nemesis, Osama Bin Laden competes with and seeks to counter among Muslim populations the inspiration of the anti-imperial Islamic revolution emanating from Iran. It vied with the budding secular Arab nationalisms from the s on. Al-Afghani seems to have envisioned Islam as primarily a means of social control.
He also collaborated with the French and Russians on various political schemes. With thanks to Mahmoud Abu Rumieleh, Webmaster. At Versailles, the British also forged agreement between the Zionists and the Hashemites which survives today in the Jordan-Israel relationship. I need the Ukraine so that they cannot starve me out as happened in the last war. Cited in Time, 2 July available at:. This is documented by the greatest spy of WWII, Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jewish communist who ran the so-called Red Orchestra in occupied Europe, the network of communist sympathizers who informed Soviet military intelligence of Nazi plans.
The Germans eventually captured Trepper and he pretended to be a double agent, convincing the Germans that he could negotiate a separate peace between the Soviet Union and Germany at the very time the Germans were desperately seeking a separate peace with the US and Britain.
This Great Game was code-named Operation Bear. US spy1 The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there must be something we are missing.
Gamal Abdel-Nasser 2 This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men.
I was very much a part of that. Christian missionaries were as visible as in GGI, acting as handmaidens of imperialism. The underlying goal of the formerly competing western empires of GGI, now united under US hegemony, was to align ex-colonies against communism and capture the most market control in competition with the now Soviet-Chinese heartland and the anti-colonial movement, while the Soviet Union and its allies tried to encourage the emerging nations to follow a more independent course, to build balanced, selfreliant economies that meet basic social needs, while avoiding tying themselves to the traditional colonial role of supplying raw materials to a capricious world market, where prices can rise or fall wildly, alternately providing windfall profits or threatening bankruptcy.
This playing field was very different from GGI, providing a modicum of hope that the dependency model of imperialism could be broken through anti-imperialist alliances and farsighted planning. This hope derived from the fact that the western nations had been forced to ally with the Soviet Union from —45 and adopt its antiimperialist rhetoric as GGII got underway.
As a consequence, the period from —, though officially one of peace, was really one of unremitting upheaval, with imperialism on the defensive, especially in the —60s, during the heyday of anti-imperial struggle, when socialist and communist revolutionary fervor was sweeping the globe. Even western Europe, occupied by US forces, witnessed communists holding important cabinet posts in coalition governments after the war.
Britain elected a Labour government in , intent on socialist reforms, despite the prestige of wartime leader Winston Churchill. For a few years, it looked like communism might triumph around the world. The experience of the US during the war as a planned economy had shown the viability and advantages of socialism—full employment and extensive social welfare—policies the allies were compelled to follow during the war to ensure a compliant working class remained united with their capitalist elites to defeat Nazism.
When the likes of Nkrumah failed to embrace capitalism, they would be deposed, as indeed he was in a CIA-inspired coup in The days following WWI had been halcyon ones for British foreign policy strategists. The architect of what came to be the post imperial strategy consensus for Central Asia was, curiously enough, the same Mackinder who so captured the imagination of British imperialists prior to WWI.
The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth. With the overwhelmingly pro-communist world sentiment following the defeat—primarily by the Soviet Union—of the Nazis, it was very much touch and go. But Mackinder was not so worried, and anticipated the Cold War as not such a bad thing for the long term interests of the empire.
He was more worried about a resurgent western Europe with the now reformed Germans as the engine of prosperity. He had read his Haushofer, remembered Rapallo5 and saw the real threat to the Anglo-American empire not from a now devastated Russia, with a crude planned economy and a ruthless dictatorship, but from an independent Europe, which unless tied carefully to the US, could become the postimperial social democratic alternative to empire and come to terms with the Soviet Union, opening the Eurasian heartland to itself.
He argued that western Europe, above all a resurgent Germany, would be the main challenge to post-war Anglo-American hegemony. What was important was to contain western Europe and keep it solidly in the US sphere of influence after The alliance with the Soviet Union in WWII had inspired the western public with the ideas of socialism, especially after the widespread suffering during the protracted depression of the GGI endgame in the s, when the experiment in socialist planning in the Soviet Union was much admired.
The wartime planned economies in the US and Canada quickly ended unemployment and resulted in rapid economic development, further inspiring popular support for a post-war socialist order, especially in Europe, where imperial dreams had already largely faded, and where communist partisans had been the most visible and principled actors in liberating Nazi-occupied lands.
Despite deeply engrained anticommunism in North America, communists were elected there. This frightened the western establishment, caught between the Nazi devil and the deep blue sea of world socialist revolution.
During its existence, it faced constant hostility, subversion and two invasions and , as the imperial powers attempted to destroy it, realizing it was indeed the enemy of imperialism. The resulting harsh, paranoid rule of Stalin proved a useful foil for the imperialists, and the later decline in Soviet economic performance, combined with unremitting pressure from the West, finally led to its collapse.
Its ideology of equality on the personal level and between states internationally, of the importance of the collective, plus its disapproval of private property and commodity fetishism were ascetic and idealistic. It faced an uphill battle competing with the subtler ideology of market equality, individualism, private property and the lure of unlimited personal wealth. The Soviet Union was not responsible for any of the dozens of third world revolutions against imperialism and never threatened to invade western Europe or attack America.
The geopolitical version of the ideology of anticommunism was the domino theory, warning that if one country came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow. Now, colonies had the right to, and were to be given in some cases only after they had won it their independence, subject to the domino theory. Any sign of challenge to US hegemony, as in the case of Iran and many other countries in the —60s, however, did not permit invasion and colonization as in GGI, but it did legitimize 3 —empire exceptionalism, permitting the US to employ all necessary means short of invasion to bring into line and if necessary overthrow the offending government and install an acceptable one, preferably later legitimized in US-monitored elections—using the new soft power techniques.
In GGI, the goals of empire could be pursued without much concern about how—might and the interests of the empire were enough. GGII required more subterfuge, since all nations were, at least theoretically, sovereign and there was no empire, at least not officially. This strategy became the standard for GGII, both using financial, political and other pretexts to justify intervention by the center. GGII was really two games: one directed against the Soviet Union and its European socialist allies, and the other against the nations struggling for independence from imperial control.
While the Soviet Union supported the latter against the US, these countries were rarely subservient to Soviet demands and all could have been seduced by a more benign US to stay neutral or even pro-US. However, the US was obsessed with destroying communism, and sacrificed all other options in pursuit of this one phantom.
This hardnosed approach by the US was necessary to ensure that the British and French empires would be destroyed, at the same time as the losers—Germany and Japan—would be rebuilt under US control, all now beholden to the US, as faithful allies. It was vital to avoid the disastrous blowback which followed the Versailles Treaty, which had victimized the loser, prepared the way for the Nazis and strengthened the communists.
Under the specter of communism, now a very real internal threat to capitalism, this world order was more equitable than the one Britain tried to create following WWI.
As Europe recovered after the war, trade grew rapidly, working class living standards rose spurred on by full employment, Germany was integrated peacefully into the fabric of a subdued Europe, and Japan and South Korea became thriving developed economies. In real life, the American empire achieved two such coups as GGII got underway, creating a new playing field and rules of the game.
The real financial pillar was in fact the dollar, with the US having effective veto power in the IMF whose head is chosen, at least officially, by an obedient Europe and the World Bank whose head is chosen by the US. Britain was bankrupt and the pound on life-support. A prostrate Europe was saved from communist revolutions by the US Marshall Plan begun in , and its ex-colonies, upon achieving independence, were drawn into the US orbit.
But as empires expand and reach their zenith, eventually capital flows in reverse again, with the outsourcing of jobs, and with financial resources accumulated in the periphery eventually flowing back to the center as profits and to cover growing trade deficits. This happened in the past in the Roman and British empires, and started in the US from on, during the Vietnam war, when the US became a net debtor and US gold reserves almost disappeared, forcing President Richard Nixon to suspend the last pretense of the gold standard.
By removing the last trace of the gold standard, countries would get only promissory notes to pay promissory notes. This was the parapolitical equivalent of recrowning the already threadbare dollar queen, since the rest of the world would now fund US wars and prop up the declining US economy even as its balance of trade deficit grew exponentially. The irony of this is that, as a bankrupt on the international account, a strong industrial nation can exert even greater force in the world of nations than a solvent creditor can.
This exposes the US dollar-based monetary system as the real domino, not the supposed communist one. Surplus is now extracted from not only the periphery but from the other first world countries by the US on the basis of this subterfuge.
The goal, then, becomes to protect the US dollar at all costs. Combined with the other crucial goal—to ensure oil supplies, now mostly imported—this led to the strategy of manipulating oil prices. Such a blatant cartel would be illegal if undertaken by the oil companies, but was fine if done by sovereign nations acting on their own. Following the invasion of Sinai and all of Palestine by Israel, the pressure to establish some kind of equilibrium in the Middle East built up to a breaking point.
When Israel refused to return Sinai to Egypt, it was clear that Egypt would have to launch a war, a war which it could hardly be expected to win, but which could endanger US access to Middle East oil. The Egyptian move in to regain Sinai and push Israel towards a genuine settlement of the Palestinian problem was supported by Saudi King Faisal, who effected the oil embargo in protest against US support for Israel in the war.
Only US consumers were inconvenienced, with oil producers reaping huge profits, and US and British banks the beneficiaries of the flood of dollars. The Saudis, Iraqis and Iranians, mollified by a vague promise by Israel to negotiate the return of Sinai, and awash in dollars, acquiesced to continued US world financial diktat and the recycling of their new wealth denominated in dollars, reinforcing the power of Anglo-American financial interests. We have to remember that the two key governments that pushed for the oil rise were Saudi Arabia and Iran, then under the Shah of Iran, the most proAmerican government in the whole of OPEC.
The major consequence of that oil rise and price rise, the first one, was in fact to shift money to the oilproducing countries, which was immediately placed in US banks. It was harder for Europe and for Japan to deal with this than it was for the United States. Israel was already out of control and direct appeals were pointless. A young idealist, he was recruited by the National Security Agency and given a job with a private consulting firm in the early s after completing a stint with the Peace Corps.
The few attempts by Europeans to break the Big Oil mould were nipped in the bud. In , after concluding an agreement with the Soviet Union and while negotiating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American monopoly was over. He died in in a mysterious plane crash. Only de Gaulle dared to dream of an independent Europe, refusing to cow to NATO, but a subservient Germany prevented any alternative to the Anglo-American empire from taking shape in Europe.
Military-political Strategies As GGII got underway, the crudest strategy to achieve the prize of Eurasia would have been of course straightforward invasion of the Soviet Union. Churchill contemplated an immediate war against the Soviet Union when Germany surrendered—Operation Unthinkable.
To keep the Anglo-American imperial project on course, he officially launched the Cold War in sleepy Fulton, Missouri in , as a secondbest strategy to ensure the US did not make a post-war deal with the Soviet Union, pushing Britain aside. Contrary to Cold War mythology, the Soviet Union had no plans to invade the West, never threatened to attack the West, nor did it even engage in acts of sabotage.
The US indeed needed assured oil access, but this does not require geopolitical hegemony, as this could have been accomplished via the world market system. Just which powers threatened to impose their own hegemony in the region other than the US and Israel is not stated. Of course what was implied was that independent Arab states could threaten the other two objectives. But the US would only have to fear for its access to oil if it was tied to an Israel making war on its Arab neighbors, which had nothing to do with the Soviet Union.
Israel needed a stable relationship with its neighbors, but this was not something the US could guarantee, as from the start it was not part of the Zionist agenda see Chapter 4. Suave British diplomats still couch the new subordinate role of Britain in the US empire in terms of British influence and restraint over the brash US; however, the British had no say in the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, and have no veto over even those on hair-trigger notice on UK bases.
There was no serious attempt to achieve a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union in the post-WWII world, despite the wartime alliance and goodwill, as this would have allowed the emerging ex-colonies to opt for socialism as opposed to incorporation into the US empire.
Which of course they were, since it is only rational that the US as chief architect of the post-war international system would set rules which would allow it to win. Decolonization The very existence of certain players requires a move on the part of the imperial team. For instance, Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Middle East at the end of WWI to ensure control of the region and the oil reserves of Iraq through a calculated policy of divide-and-rule.
Five such queens are presented. The first is the "ascendancy of the U. Locked into its cold war with communism, Walberg sees the cultivation of Islamists against communism as the third queen. The mujahideen, Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" brought to a close the second great game in Eurasia the first being the historically defined "games" between the British and Russian empires.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the neocons to power in the U. The first "queen promotion" of this current era is the redefinition of NATO as essentially being a U. Banksters take control Back onto one of Walberg's central ideas, the Great Game III is a demonstrably financial pursuit, with the bankrupting of Russia after its imperial death, the removal of constraints on financial manipulations within the U.
The end game for the Great Game III is the "control over the world's money supply" as a means of "taxing the world's resources. It is evident in the IMF and World Bank actions against Greece, Ireland, and other Euro states that have effectively ceded their financial and thus sovereign authority to the banksters.
Israel Having touched on Israel in the third chapter concerning U. For the U. Without hostile neighbours, it would be of no use to the US. I think Walberg captures the importance of his book in his preface where he discusses his feelings about living in the Islamic world and the impetus behind Postmodern Imperialism.
There are many such journeys of discovery by people coming of age politically. Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games. This text is under a Creative Commons license : Attribution-Noncommercial 2. Site map — Contact us — Website credits — Syndication. Privacy Policy — About Cookies. Skip to navigation — Site map. European journal of American studies. Contents - Previous document - Next document.
Reviews Joseph Michael Gratale. Index Text References About the author. Index terms Top of page. Full text PDF Send by e-mail. Published in European journal of American studies , Reviews Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, editor. David C.
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