1st Edition
Strategic Impasse Social Origins of Geopolitical Disarray
"Damned if you do; damned if you don’t" voices the strategic impasse the USA finds itself in today. Liberal interventionism and globalization—the two pillars of the international system—seem not to work. Explaining the inability of Western powers to enact wise initiatives, Corradi explores the de-coupling of political systems: we are connected with each other but disconnected from policy makers. The paradox of increased connectivity and collective disengagement sets a perverse dynamic between publics and elites, with a serious impact on world affairs. Corradi analyzes the social bases of present dilemmas and how incipient decline can be managed, and paralysis overcome.
Preface
Chapter 1
We Have a Problem
Chapter 2
Running Amok, or the End of Capitalism as We Know It
Chapter 3
The Failure of Alternatives
Chapter 4
The New Ancien Régime
Chapter 5
The Mindless Mind, or the New Wiles of Propaganda
Chapter 6
Another Rubicon? Reflections on Defeasance in the West
Chapter 7
Behemoth Lite: National-Populist Democracy and Its Impact on Strategy
Chapter 8
When Nobody Minds the Shop
Chapter 9
Geostrategic Rivalries in a Period of Potential Deglobalization
Epilogue
Postscript
After Pax Americana: Ten Theses on Geopolitical Disarray
Index
Biography
Dr. Juan E. Corradi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of the book, South of the Crisis: Latin American Perspectives on the Late Capitalist World (Anthem Press, 2010). As a native Latin American teaching in the USA, his work in cultural sociology has informed his scholarship on world affairs for four decades.
