Conville & Walsh

The United States has been the unchallenged world leader during the period of capitalist globalisation. It has used its hegemonic position to promote a privatised free market economy in which the constraints that regulated the market economy in previous decades were progressively dismantled. It was widely thought that this epoch would witness the ‘end of history’ and worldwide dominance of American values and institutional structures. Under US leadership, the spread of capitalist globalisation has produced immense benefits. However, that system faces fundamental challenges, which threaten the very existence of the human species.

The way in which the United States responds to those challenges will determine the fate of the whole human race.

Capitalist freedom comprehensively threatens the natural environment. It threatens to produce intense conflict over access to scarce resources. It has contributed to intensified global inequality within both rich and poor countries, and between the internationalised global power elite and the mass of citizens rooted within their respective nations. It has produced a global financial crisis that threatens the global economy. The use of military force remains an important weapon in international relations. Mankind’s obliteration in a nuclear holocaust in a matter of minutes remains a constant possibility.

It may only be the approaching ‘final hour’ that ultimately forces human beings to grope their way towards globally cooperative solutions to contain the contradictions inherent within the capitalist system. The possibility for success in this Darwinian endeavour – no less than the survival of the human species in its present form – hinges upon the relationship between, on the one hand, the United States, and, on the other, China and the Islamic world, each of which contains 1.3 billion people.

As the world moves into the new millennium, humanity stands at a crossroads. The epoch of ‘wild capitalist globalisation’ is fast drawing to a close, hastened by the global financial crisis. The contradictions of capitalism in the early twentieth century are, for the first time global in nature. In the search for solutions to the multiple threats to the sustainability of life for the human species, there is no alternative other than to work together across national
frontiers, cultures and levels of development, to find a pragmatic, non-ideological, cooperative way to overcome these threats. The threats derive from the nature of capitalist globalisation itself. The solutions also are imminent within the universal tendencies of capitalism. The path taken by the United States, at this crossroads in its own history and in that of the human race will determine the outcome for the whole human species.

The central question addressed in this book is this: can the United States engage constructively with both China and the Islamic world to devise cooperative solutions to the inherent contradictions of wild capitalist globalisation, which threaten the very survival of humanity?