That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies, paid for at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The demonstration of US military overreach, in Iraq in particular, strengthened the hand of those prepared to defy America’s will at both a regional and global level. Russia’s decisive response to Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia confirmed the shift and marked the end of unchecked US unilateralism.
This passing of the unipolar moment, driven home by the exposure of the limits to US power, was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world during the first ten years of the new millennium – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the financial crash of 2008 and the profound crisis of the Western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up the relative decline of the US in the process. This was a crisis that had been made in the US and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power – including those of Britain, the US and the European Union.
A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world for a generation as the only viable way of running a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and disastrous environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest global state intervention in history.5 The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism that held the world in their grip at the start of the century had been tried and tested to destruction.
The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early years of the twenty-first century. Not only did the country’s dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty and more than halve the economic gap with the US in the decade, but its still state-driven investment model allowed it to ride out the first few years of the West’s slump without even a slowdown, making a mockery of neoliberal market orthodoxy.
At the same time China’s rapid expansion began to create a new centre of power in the emerging multipolar world that increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states, squeezed by the absence of any alternative centre of power to the US and its allies since the end of the cold war. Carrying out more than half its trade with developing economies, China became a motor of growth for the global south, while the traditional masters of the world economy continued to be mired in crisis.6
That profound shift in turn widened the space for the tide of progressive social change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance that shaped the opening of the new century. Driven by the region’s dismal early experience of neoliberalism and US absorption in the war on terror, radical socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power across the region, attacking economic and racial injustice, carving out a new regional independence, challenging US domination and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them in the twenty-first century.
These momentous changes and social advances came, of course, with huge costs and a heavy dose of qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant global military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan was paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of new forms of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments across the Western world continued to try to refloat it, forcing through austerity programmes that slashed jobs and living standards and spread poverty. China’s success was itself bought at a high price in inequality, abuse of civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America’s US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the decade’s social gains, as they succeeded in doing by a violent coup in Honduras in 2009.
Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world. If the transformations of the twenty-first century’s first decade really began with 9/11, they came full circle in the uprisings that erupted in Tunisia and Egypt in the winter of 2010–11, sparking another shift of global proportions. Triggered by the fallout from the West’s economic crisis, the uprisings led in turn to renewed Western military intervention and attempts to commandeer or divert them, both from within and beyond the region.
But the popular impetus to revolt drew its strength not from the legacy of the earlier US neocon campaign for Western-controlled cod democracies across the Middle East, as its discredited architects would shamelessly claim. It arose from the same Arab refusal to accept the passive role assigned to them that had driven resistance to Western-backed war, occupation and tyranny throughout the previous ten years.
For all the setbacks, crimes and catastrophes, a decade on from 9/11 the neoliberal Washington Consensus had fallen; the New World Order was no more; and space for progressive movements and states had opened up across the world. History had begun to take revenge. Those are the transformations described and analysed, as they happened, in these pages.
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A decade after it was launched, Bush’s war on terror had become such an embarrassment to the US government that it had to change the official name to ‘overseas contingency operations’.7 The Iraq invasion was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster. The occupation of Afghanistan was widely accepted to be a doomed undertaking that could never bring peace to the country or the region. But such chastened realism couldn’t be further from the way these punitive campaigns were regarded in the Western mainstream when they were first unleashed by George Bush and Tony Blair. War fever and credulous cheerleading were the order of the day for the political class and the bulk of a loyalist media on both sides of the Atlantic.
To return to what was routinely said by British and American politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 or the run-up to the invasion of Iraq is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy and utter disregard for the human consequences of the cataclysms that had been set in motion. All was nevertheless reported as logical and largely reasonable by a house-trained media, while every attempt was made to discredit or marginalise those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.
It’s a lesson in the power of even the flimsiest propaganda deployed by modern Western states when vital interests of security are regarded as being at stake. In the aftermath of 9/11, the political and media reaction to anyone who linked the attacks to decades of Western intervention and support for client dictatorships in the Muslim world, or who challenged the drive to war, was savage.
Almost uniquely in the British media at the time, the Guardian published a full-spectrum debate about why the attacks had taken place and how the US and wider Western world should respond. The backlash verged on the deranged. This was treasonous ‘anti-Americanism’, it was claimed. Michael Gove, later a Conservative cabinet minister in David Cameron’s government, declared that the Guardian had become a ‘Prada-Meinhof gang’ of ‘fifth columnists’.
The novelist Robert Harris, then still a Blair intimate,8 denounced the paper for hosting a ‘babble of idiots’ who were unable to understand that the world was now re-fighting the war against Hitler. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun damned those warning against war as ‘anti-American propagandists of the fascist left press’. By the time the Taliban regime had been overthrown a couple of months later and Afghan women were said to be throwing off burkas to celebrate their ‘liberation’, the prime minister’s Downing Street office issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and the war on terror. We had, the statement declared, been ‘proved to be wrong’.9
A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair’s government and its media acolytes who had in fact been ‘proved to be wrong’, with catastrophic consequences – while its opponents had
