Meanwhile other states-and the capitals operating from them-were able to take advantage of the US's perceived weakness to advance their own positions. The most important West European states, France and Germany, had refused to back the 2003 Iraq War, unlike the first Iraq War of 1991. The French state in particular saw a weakening of US influence in the Middle East as an opportunity to advance the interests of French capital in regions where its interests clashed with the US's. China was able to benefit from the US entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan to expand its own influence, particularly in Africa and Latin America. This went hand in hand with growing trade links, as it looked to mineral imports from Africa and agricultural imports from Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Soon Russia too was flexing its rather weaker muscles, as increased oil revenue allowed it to recover from the economic collapse of the previous decades and to exert pressure on some of the other former Soviet republics; Iran took advantage of the US's setbacks to increase its leverage in Iraq and Lebanon; the BRICS formed an ad hoc alliance to advance their common trade interests in opposition to both the US and the EU, so paralysing the Doha round of trade negotiations from which US corporations had hoped to get even easier access to foreign markets. The US discovered that when three of its client states launched wars for objects it supported-Israel in Lebanon in 2006, Ethiopia in Somalia in 2007, Georgia against Ossetia in 2008-it was not in a situation to stop them facing defeat.
Commentators who had not long before insisted the collapse of the USSR had created a "unipolar world" with one superpower were beginning to talk about "multi polarity", with the US only able to get its way by making concessions to other powers. Some thought this meant a more peaceable world. But the multipolarity is a world of states and their associated capitals which have different interests and are out to impose them on the others when they get the chance. It is the multipolarity in which old imperialist imperatives are strengthened j ust as it becomes more difficult for them to be successful. It is a world, in short, beset by a multitude of contradictory pressures and compelled, therefore, to experience one convulsive political crisis after another. This became clear when the great economic delusion gave way to a great economic crisis.
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The New Age of Global Instability