ABSTRACT
There has been a resurgence of interest in the logic and substance of geopolitical practice at the global scale. This renewed interest can, in part, be traced to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and to the Bush administration’s subsequent invasion of Afghanistan as well as its unilateral and pre-emptive war against Iraq (Arrighi 2005). Indeed, much of this literature focuses explicitly on the US and on its geopolitical interests. For example, it is said: that the international stage is an increasingly dense network of imperial interactions centred on Washington DC – a ‘world state’ in which US geopolitical and geoeconomic power is more concentrated and far-reaching than it was in 1945 (Barkawi and Laffey 1999; 2002; Shaw 2000); that the ‘grand strategy’ of the current Bush administration is to exploit the post-9/11 geopolitical climate of fear to shore up support for the Anglo-American model of free trade and for US capitalism more specifically (Callinicos 2002); that the punitive financial innovations engineered by the IMF, the World Bank, Wall Street bankers, and other international financial institutions headquartered in the US allows the US Treasury to restructure trade relations with LDCs around exploitative market access politics (Gowan 1999); that US neoimperial might in the world economy is the product of a successful post-Bretton Woods drive to break down national controls on finance and to redirect global savings to the US (Panitch and Gindin 2003); that, although imperial, US foreign policy is caught between economic, political, ideological, and military projects which play out incoherently on the ground and which portend a crisis of leadership (Mann 2003); and, among other things, that the ongoing US war in Iraq is a unilateral attempt to secure access to the Middle East oil spigot in order to give energy-dependent US-based firms a competitive advantage over overseas rivals (Klare 2001, Harvey 2003; Jhaveri 2004; more generally on the resource basis of US geopolitical practice, see Cohen 2003).
