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

Peter Gowan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Peter Gowan is Senior Lecturer in European Studies at the University of North London. He is co-editor, with Perry Anderson, of The Question of Europe, and an editor of New Left Review and Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Verso Books (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859842712
• ISBN-13: 978-1859842713
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #953,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On Target Perspective, November 13, 2002

By 

Douglas Doepke (Claremont, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance (Paperback)

Can globalization be understood as the strictly market-driven phenomenon its proponents claim it to be. No, argues Peter Gowan, an editor of New Left Review. Such a narrow economic focus provides little real insight into the forces and objectives behind the American-led push to globalize. Instead, Gowan insists, there is a political component to the equation too often overlooked, yet it is this political component that provides the needed framework. Key here is what Gowan terms the Dollar Wall Street Regime (DWSR), a collaboration between Wall Street and financial organs of government. Contrary to orthodox opinion, DWSR views the relation between the state and the private sector as an essentially cooperative one, at least at the upper reaches of big business. Thus an intertwining of politics and economics stands behind the American drive for global dominance, a strategy that makes coordinate use of both state and private resources. Characterizing DWSR are two far-reaching and controversial theses. First, despite current wisdom, the state remains a key actor on the international stage, at least in the industrialized world; and second, there is nothing inevitable about a globalizing process once the role of political choice is understood. Taken together, these contentions challenge not only widely-held mainstream beliefs but swathes of ideological opinion on both left and right.

Gowan traces the historical evolution of DWSR in Part One, with an emphasis on international financial jockeying. Part Two focuses on the political dimension, particularly as it bears on the Middle East and eastern Europe. DWSR's capacity to illuminate is especially strong when dealing with post-cold war events in eastern Europe. Here it's fascinating to note the architect of Shock Therapy Jeffrey Sachs' incomprehension of how his measures are used to subjugate the region to US and European interests, instead of conforming to his more egalitarian theoretical model. Or, put another way, DWSR deceitfully uses a concrete program like Shock Therapy for selfish political ends, despite rhetoric to the contrary -- rhetoric Sachs apparently takes at face value, leaving him no one to blame for the failures except bumbling bureaucrats. As the author points out, Shock Therapy actually worked quite effectively as one component in the West's drive to subordinate the economies of former Soviet Bloc states.

Gowan's book is invaluable for making sense of current global developments: evidence of an axis like the DWSR appears overwhelming in daily news accounts, both foreign (Iraqi oil-grab) and domestic (Enron revelations). The author's style is scholarly, yet accessible to the serious reader, even though an index and bibliography would have been helpful. It's unfortunate that the work appears to be going largely unnoticed on the Amazon web. It certainly deserves a much better outcome.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Class by Itself, July 29, 2005

By 

World Student (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance (Paperback)

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!!

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars highly recommended, June 10, 2001

By 

michael m (royal oak, mi United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance (Paperback)

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).