ABSTRACT
One of the unintended, long-term casualties of the US invasion of Iraq may be the ideology of globalization that presents global capitalism as an inevitable process that is beyond the control of states. The war revealed one of the principal contradictions of capitalism: the contradiction between the global scope of capitalist economic forces and the more spatially and politically limited boundaries of the nation-state. Calls from US foreign policy officials and intellectuals for a new American imperialism, in which no threats to US power will be tolerated (Foster 2003; Research Unit for Political Economy 2003), seem to violate the basic tenets of globalization, with their emphasis on US political-military might. After all, if globalization is truly an inevitable and irreversible process emerging from the logic of markets, a process that necessarily brings the benefits of prosperity and democracy to all, what need is there for coercive state power to impose this system?
