Organisation sessions. And in the East, Chinese growth was replacing the older challenge from Japan. Writing in 1994, Henry Kissinger expressed his unease:
The US is actually in no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War . . . The United States will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the Cold War . . . China is on the road to superpower status . . . China's GNP will approach that of the US by the end of the second decade of the 21st century. Long before that China's shadow will fall over Asia.48
What is more, a quarter of a century of growing internationalisation of finance, investment, trade and production made US capitalism vulnerable to events beyond its borders. Its great multinational corporations needed some policy which would enable the might of the US state to exercise control over such events. Already towards the end of the Clinton Administration there were moves towards a more aggressive foreign policy designed to achieve this, with the push to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, but this did not go far enough for a group of Republican politicians, businessmen and academics-the infamous neoconservative "Project for a New American Century" formed in the late 1990s. Their starting point was the insistence that the way to stop "a decline in American power" was a return to a "Reaganite" policy based on large increases in defence spending, the building of a missile defence system, and action to deal with "threats" from "dictatorships" in China, Serbia, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.49 "Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge. We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge". <sup>so</sup>
The Republican electoral victory of 2000 and then the national panic caused by the 9/1 1 destruction of the World Trade Centre gave them a chance to implement their policy.
It amounted in practice to further building up the military might of the US-and then using it to assert US global dominance against all comers. Increased arms spending and massive tax cuts for the rich were meant to pull the US out of recession, just as the "military Keynesianism" of Reagan had two decades before. Increased arms spending would lead to recovery from recession, to further military handouts to finance technical advances for computer, software or aviation corporations, and to an increased capacity to dictate policies to other ruling classes-and all paid for by even bigger investment flows into the US as it demonstrated its overriding power. The aim was for the US to more than compensate for losing its old lead in market competition by using the one thing it has that the other powers do not-overwhelming military might. It was an updated version of the logic of imperialism as described by Bukharin in the early 1920s, with the difference that the rival capitalist states were not going to be forced into subservience by wars directly against them, but by the display of the US's capacity to wield global power through wars it and its client states waged in the Global South.
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The New Age of Global Instability