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

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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.

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!!

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).

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...

Alas! I disagree with Michael M: reading this book was a waste of my time, and buying it a waste of my money. The problem is that he gets the "inside" story pretty much completely wrong...