economic production, Eurasia - the vast landmass between Lisbon and Vladivostock, bounded by North Africa in the south, the Atlantic in the west and the Pacific in the east.
part of this - but only a part - is A
military domination, crucially conStrol of the oceans and air power dominance. While this forms a crucial backdrop, also central to the mainte nance of US domination are a bundle of advantages, including economic and technological leadership, the magnetic attraction (especially to the young) of US mass culture and the attractiveness of the US political and society 'model
Maximising these advantages requires not the profligate use of military might. which is inimical to democracy, but the adroit use of political and diplomatic skills.
Brzezinski's own formula for this is WHILE George W Bush prepares to squander a minimum of 5200 their medical provision cut back as states grapple with a cash crisis. The Medicaid programme, the 'safety net' which covers almost 24 disabled Americans, is only partly funded by Federal grants of $147 billion: another $100 billion is raised at state level people are sliding into poverty and drug costs rocket. Medicaid benefits and another 15 are increasing the charges to Medicaid patients also pay a heavy price. billion on invading Iraq, some of the USA's poorest families are seeing million children, I1 million adults and more than 13 million older and But the US economie slide means that revenues are falling, while more A survey now shows that of the 50 US states, 40 are clamping down on Medicaid prescription costs, 29 are freezing payment levels to hospitals and providers, 18 are restricting eligibility for Medicaid, 15 are cutting So the war drive is not just injuring Iraqi civilians: poor Americans will
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politics of armed globalisation
Bush's key advisors Wolfowitz and Perle have thrown the Grand Chessboard version into the dustbin and proclaimed a new militarist activism various forms of radicalism. What's happened to the global justice movement is indicative here.
Immediately after September I the global justice movement was knocked back, especially in the United States itself - a consequence of the gigantic reactionary mobilisation unparalleled since McCarthyism in the 1950s.
However, on a world scale the movement has recovered and fed into the antiwar movement, which in the medium term is bound to radicalise the movement.
Key to this political development are debates about imperialism. When a faintly critical Blairite like Polly Toynbee proclaims in the Guardian that the US is creating a "new imperium", it is indicative of the popular debates which are developing.
A first ideological victim of this will be theorists like Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, who in their influential book Empire, proclaim the transition away from imperialism to a 'smooth globalised system without an international structure of hierarchy characteristic of the old imperialist empires.
Hardly had the book been published when basic facts in international politics refuted it. Only the classical Marxist theory of imperialism is able to explain events since September II.
The stakes in the tum to permanent war are immense for American capitalism. The 'war on terrorism' is not just one foreign policy option which can be easily politics fitted together perfectly. amounting to a doctrine of permanent war, with no natural limits - including on the use of nuclear weapons.
• • ..... rations, or that globalisation is an States, but not only them.