Insecure people often react violently, for example, but we cannot confront someone coming at us with a knife with soothing words to assuage their insecurities. The difficulty that Western policy elites face in situations of the current sort in Ukraine is that short-run and immediate problems need to be addressed in ways that do not exacerbate the underlying roots of conflicts. The increasing militarization of the US economy after 1945 also went hand in hand with the production of greater economic inequality and the formation of a ruling oligarchy within the USA as well as elsewhere (even in Russia). Before Reagan, the top tax rate in the US never fell below 70 percent while, since Reagan, the rate has never exceeded forty percent, thus disproving the right wing’s insistence that high taxes inhibit growth. Reagan’s resort to military Keynesianism to orchestrate an arms race against the Soviet Union played a contributory role in the end of the Cold War at the same time as it distorted the economies of both countries. Much of these spawned widespread civilian uses, such as aviation, the internet and nuclear technologies, thus contributing in a major way to the support for endless capital accumulation and the increasing centralization of capitalist power in relation to a captive market.įurthermore, resort to “military Keynesianism” became a favoured exception in times of difficulty to the neoliberal austerity regimes otherwise periodically administered to the populations of even the advanced capitalist countries after 1970 or so. Cultivating fear (both fake and real) of the Soviets and Communism was instrumental to this politics The economic consequence has been wave after wave of technological and organizational innovation in military hardware. It was often manipulated to their economic advantage by those US corporations that constitute what Eisenhower long ago referred to as the military industrial complex. Up until 1991, the Cold War provided a fairly constant background to the functioning of the world order. Meanwhile, “hot” wars (both civil and inter-state) have been waged in abundance since 1945, beginning with the Korean and Vietnam wars followed by the Yugoslav wars and the NATO bombing of Serbia, two wars against Iraq (one of which was justified by patent lies by the US about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction), the wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria. Institutions of collaboration were set up in Europe (the common market, the European Union, NATO, the euro). The inter-state competition in Europe that produced two world wars has largely been contained, and West Germany and Japan were peaceably re-incorporated into the capitalist world system after 1945 (in part to combat the threat of Soviet communism). There is myth that the world has been at peace since 1945 and that the world order constructed under the hegemony of the United States has largely worked to contain the war-like proclivities of capitalist states in competition with each other.
I therefore offer some non-expert comments as a basis for discussion. As such, it cannot be ignored by the geographers assembled (alas by zoom) at our annual meeting. The outbreak of full-fledged war following the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a deep turning point in the world order.
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