Vivid exploration of the sources and contradictions of the neoconservative worldview

This book argues that the Bush Administration’s debacle in the Middle East is part of a much deeper crisis of American grand strategy. It offers a new way of thinking about the problems facing leading capitalist powers in formulating and managing grand strategies, and explores the nature of the current American geopolitical crisis through a comparison with the British case in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although in some respects the British and American cases are opposites, they share common sources at a profound level, sources endemic to the nature of capitalist power politics. The book also argues that conventional accounts of international relations tend to miss these deeper sources of the problems of grand strategy. Through the course of the study Gowan examines the work of Samuel Coleridge, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Nitze, Lord Milner, and Donoso Cortez

Peter Gowan is Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and a member of the Editorial Board of New Left Review. He is the author of The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (winner of the Isaac Deutscher prize, 2000), and co-editor, with Perry Anderson, of The Question of Europe.