It is hardly news to say that we are living in an ultra-capitalist world: one initiated and then overseen by Washington, when the collapse of the Soviet Union gave it victory in the Cold War and a unique primacy after 1992. It has built a global system and crushed the 20th-century left.
Today, however, and largely thanks to US recklessness, it is a system in ‘polycrisis’. Its failures have been spectacular: military, in Iraq and Afghanistan; financial, with the great crash of 2008; economic, in terms of the well-being of the US working and middle classes; environmental, as the planet burns, and ideological, with the ruin of its neoliberal claim that ‘the market knows best’.
Added to this are two failures of the US’s post 1992 global strategy. One is the greatest human achievement of the period – the transformation of China out of poverty, which created an economic and strategic competitor that was not subordinate to Wall Street. The second is the way the US colluded with the oligarchs generated by the failures of Communism, to loot and bankrupt Russia rather than create an ally.
