ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the shifts in US foreign policy strategy following the Cold War and up until the events of 9/11, and the impact that this had on the use and sponsorship of state terrorism by liberal democratic states from the North, particularly the US, in the South. Following the Cold War, led by the US, those states, through the international financial institutions (IFIs), have heavily promoted neoliberal economics in the South. I demonstrate that the US in particular has invested heavily in the neoliberalisation of the South. I show that US state and capital interests have remained central to US foreign policy, but that following the Cold War, legitimation, rather than support for repression, was for the most part deemed by US policymakers to be the most effective strategy for achieving US objectives. As shown in Chapter 3, the promotion of neoliberalism has benefited other Northern liberal democratic states and international capital, as well as the US state and US capital. This shift in US foreign policy strategy resulted in a reduction in the sponsorship of state terrorism by the US following the Cold War, although it did not disappear completely from the arsenal of foreign policy tools at the disposal of US governments in the 1990s. As I will show, the US continued to back regimes known for their use of terrorism against their own populations, it continued to use aerial bombardment as a means of terrorising local populations in the hope of turning populations against regimes unfavourable to the US, as in Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, and the programme of extraordinary rendition was devised. In this chapter I comment briefly on the ongoing use and support for state terrorism by the US and its allies in the 1990s.
