Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11

In the aftermath of September 11, the U.S. has launched an ambitious project to consolidate and extend its global control. The WTC attacks provided the Bush administration an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these goals. They can now claim a new moral urgency, greater resources particularly in the military realm, more popular support for the costs of intervention overseas, and greater public acceptance of the leadership’s aims and methods. The war on terrorism represents a long-term effort to maintain a unipolar world in which allies are subordinate, strategic competitors are blocked, and threats to U.S. interests are extinguished. In the first book-length critique of this fundamental shift in policy, well-known writers and thinkers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Dan Plesch, and Ahmed Rashid analyse the motives and methods of the new Bush administration, the Axis of Evil targets of the war on terrorism, and the domestic impact of post-September 11 policies. Critical response to the new U.S. policies has come from many different sources: U.S. allies, strategic competitors such as Russia and China, the countries targeted in the war against terrorism, and dissenting public voices throughout the world, including the United States. This book will analyse the probable consequences of this response as well as the appropriate alternatives to current U.S. policies.