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PROLOGUE In November 2001, U.S. forces seized a rural part of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, and in a staged display jubilant marines hoisted an American flag on the highest point of the terrain. The reference to Teddy Roosevelt ’s Rough Riders on San Juan Hill at the dawn of the first moment of U.S. global ambition or to U.S. marines on Iwo Jima during the second moment was deliberate and as revealing as it was precise. Officially this was a “war on terrorism” fought by an “international coalition,” but the marines were under no illusion as to where the nexus of global power lay or who the ultimate victors would be. At the zenith of the third moment of U.S. global ambition, this conflation of national self-interest with global universalism has become starkly evident around the world. This manuscript was effectively completed before the so-called war on terrorism began, but the historical geography of American globalism has everything to do with understanding the causes of the first major war of the twenty-first century. Just as the earlier two moments of U.S. global ambition were punctuated by war, so too after 7 October 2001 is the third moment . Earlier conflicts such as the 1991 war against Iraq were limited and, conceived as such, compared with the declared global scope of this new war. Initiated four weeks after hijacked commercial airliners sliced into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the new war began with the U.S. military targeting an already devastated Afghanistan. It continued with an escalation of “antiterrorist” assaults from Chechnya to the Philippines, In- donesia to Colombia, and with a brutal Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Labeled a war on terrorism, the new war represents an unprecedented quickening of the American Empire, a third chance at global power. The conflation of narrow national self-interest with global good has been more acute since 11 September 2001 than at any time in the American Century. Ominous enough were the post-9/11 calls by President George W. Bush for a “new American crusade” in the Middle East and his repeated declaration that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists .” Most sharply redolent of the new American globalism, however, was the challenge to the rest of the world that if you don’t share “our values ” you can expect only retribution. For those living outside the nationalized U.S. boundaries of “our values,” there were few beneficent ways of interpreting that statement. Franklin Roosevelt aspired to have the world run by “Four Policemen,” among whom he calculated the United States would have the superior power. The new global landscape after 2001 posits a much more ambitious unilateralism as the U.S. ruling class acts in the confidence that it can be the solitary global police force. This is the real meaning of the claims that the United States won the cold war and that, as a result, it stands as the only remaining superpower. Just as the scale of capital accumulation has increasingly outgrown the nation-state, giving the global state institutions of the second moment (UN, IMF, World Bank, GATT/World Trade Organization ) a heightened relevance, part of U.S. global ambition has involved the reinvention of the national (U.S.) state at the global scale. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the moral and military opportunity to solidify that agenda. Prior to 2001 the seemingly isolationist-leaning George W. Bush would surely have seemed an unlikely leader for such a global campaign.A multimillionaire with all the means, his geographical curiosity about the rest of the world was so limited that upon assuming the presidency at the age of fifty-four, apart from vacations in Mexico, he had been out of the United States only twice. He did not even have a valid passport. Even so, some historical events are predictable, within limits. As I write in mid-2002, the U.S. government obviously seeks to expand the war. While not yet comparable in any way to the global conflagrations of the twentieth century, the limits to this war’s expansion are by no means clear. Also, it is far from clear, except perhaps in the cases of Iraq and the Palestinians, which states and cities, governments and mountain hamlets, will find themselves in the cross-hairs of global revenge and ambition. One other very...

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