The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance

By Peter Gowan

Book Overview

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc presented policy makers in Washington with a temptation reminiscent of Faust's, opening up vistas of hitherto unimaginable global power; but the cold breath of Mephistopheles is already blowing across devastated communities from southeast Asia to the Balkan peninsula in the wake of America's bid for world power. In this major analysis of the new era of American domination, Peter Gowan strips away the language of humanitarian ideals that have cloaked US interventions from Baghdad to Belgrade to reveal far more cynical goals, with the real democratic hopes of the peoples of Europe, the South and East systematically trampled down in the rush to impose NATO-based US political leadership across the globe. Gowan surveys the transformation of NATO from Cold War 'security shield' for Western Europe into a global vigilante force in pursuit of US interests, with European footsoldiers under American command. He explains the projected expansion of the EU into a set of first and second class countries, incapable of any political action independent of the United States; and he analyses the catastrophic social and economic effects of the neo-liberal 'Shock Therapy' imposed on Russia and Eastern Europe, with devastating results. Far from being an unstoppable natural force against which every nation state is powerless, Gowan argues compellingly that the process of globalisation has been relentlessly driven forward by the enormous political power of the US state and business interests in a highly conscious bid to extend their strategic dominance over the world economy. He shows how the international finance system--the 'Dollar-Wall Street Regime'--created out of the ashes of Breton Woods has been exploited as a political lever to open up local economies to US products and speculative flows of 'hot' money, and demonstrates how each financial crisis over the last ten years has been used by the Washington-Wall Street axis to force through dramatic economic and social re-engineering in the targeted countries. While posing as a benign economic education for 'developing' economies, US-led rescue packages in fact leave these countries seriously weakened, destroying national industrial sectors while elevating to power such local rentier interests as the Russian mafia-capitalists and leaving the already fragile social tissue of many of these companies irreparably damaged. This masterly survey, both bold and compelling, will become a landmark in the debate on the new world order threatening the twenty-first century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859842712
• ISBN13: 9781859842713
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Class by Itself

This book offers the most lucid descriptions of several crucial issues that you are likely to ever encounter. It is well structured, rational, specific, and well documented. Gowan renders a superb treatment of: the role of expediency in the collapse of Bretton Woods, the benefit to the Dollar-Wall Street Regime from global financial and macro-economic gyrations, the mechanisms whereby currency manipulation has a disproportionate effect on other countries, the mobilization of hedge fund attack-capital in producing the Asian Financial Crisis & the leveraging of that crisis to radically restructure East Asian domestic policy, the regional forces surrounding the first Gulf War, the disastorous implementation of the capitalist transition on Eastern Europe, and finally the way Social Democratic and formerly Communist parties danced around as they implemented this transition. This is one of the best books around concerning the motives, objectives and consequences of DC geo-political-economic policy during the '90's, it cannont fail to inform you and demythologize this sphere: it is free of demonization, over-simplification or brash rhetoric, the facts and figures are crisp and readily understandable without being overly general or conspicuously emphasized. Highest Possible Recommendation!!

The Truth Behind The Plan

Peter Gowan, writing in a sobber and technical way, clearly demonstrates the incredible amount of premeditation that the United States used to begin his fight for global economic domination, beginning with the Nixon instructed ending of the gold-dollar arrangment.The US sometimes is not aware that his politics, controlling the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, is making their ruling class richier and richier, and the world poorer and poorer, and this situation will not stand for long. This is a great book. No wonder it has so few reviews here, since people are not interested in knowing what's going on in all the ruined economies around the world, mos of them ruined not only bytheir own incompetence, but also by the IMF rules, when the IMF is nothing more than a puppet to Washington...

highly recommended

An excellent book, I learned a great deal and enjoyed reading it several times. This book explains a great deal about what goes on behind the scenes, political maneuvering and financial engineering the US uses to gain more and more power in world affairs. It helped me understand several key areas of international investing and globalization, it was especially helpful in regards to the asian financial crisis. Unfortunately i do agree with one of the themes of the book, namely that the united states will most likely fail in its attempt to control the world via globalization. More unfortunately, I believe the failure and collapse of globalization will end in financial disaster in which hyper-inflation is a distinct possibillity as our fiat currency and derivative pyramid / stock market bubble comes crashing down. My only hope is that the day of reckoning is still several years from now (maybe 2007-2010).