Politics 177 (Spring 2004): America
and the
World
Week 5/6: Constructing the Cold War Empire
4/29: The Strategic Superstructure
I. Strategy and Geography
1. Geopolitics in theory and practice: In
1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a talk to the Royal Geographical
Society called "The Geographical Pivot of History." In this talk
(and essay), he laid out the essentials of an emerging field of study
and strategy called "geopolitics." This discipline is based on
the notion that "The geographic
factor in world history is the most fundamental because it is the most
constant" (Sempa, p. 1). In others words, people come and
go, nations rise and fall, and technologies evolve, but the land never
changes. Mackinder is best remembered for his dictum (or
doggeral), " Who rules East Europe
commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the
World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the World." Mackinder
claimed not to be a geographic determinist, but it others used his
geopolitics to reify geography.
3. Geopolitics and the Cold War:
Geopolitics became the defining material component of the Cold
War. As a major military power, the Soviet Union's control of
Eastern Europe, and its location in the center of the Pivot Area,
appeared to make it well-placed to strike out in any direction in order
to make its bid for world empire: to the West lay Europe, one of the
five great centers of industrial power, to the East was China and
Japan, another industrial center. To the South were warm water
ports, oil, and Africa, all of which could provide the means to break
through the crescent and expand via the World Ocean.
4.
Geopolitics as idealism: Although
geopolitics appears to be based on sound material principles and
analysis, it is better understood as a form of idealism. To be
sure, geography has an influence on human affairs, but only to the
extent that humans act on geography, through culture, politics and
technology. Thus, the presence of oil in the Middle East does not
"attract" states who do not use it. Geography becomes an element
in planning for war and prosecuting it. Since states are thought
always to be planning for war, geography becomes and element in
peacetime activities. But people have a funny way of defying what
appear to be determinate features of geography.
II. The Origins of Containment
1. The end of the Grand Alliance: By
the end of 1946, it might be said, the Allied alliance of World War II
had collapsed. Many American policymakers never quite adjusted to
the idea of being allied to the Soviet Union, regarding Germany as a
bulwark against Bolshevism and more closely tied in cultural terms to
the Anglo-Saxon countries. At Yalta, Churchill and Stalin divided
up Europe, a step that appeared to Americans to be a reversion to the
policy of restrictive empires. A part of the end-of-war
diplomacy, Stalin made demands in keeping with a view of realpolitik:
influence in Iran, free passage from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean, a hand in China and Japan, as well as Eastern
Europe. And, while the U.S. demobilized its armed forces and sent
them home, the USSR did not (to be sure, there were few jobs or
opportunities available back home). The Americans and British saw these
as unreasonable and indicative of a Soviet desire to expand. Was
the USSR acting as an expansionist power or a defensive one?
2. George Kennan and the Long Telegram: In
the classified Long Telegram, and the "Mr. X" article in Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of
Soviet Conduct," George Kennan made an attempt to analyze Soviet
psychology and motivations and to infer, from that, what Stalin might
do and how he might be "contained." Kennan advocated specific and
sustained pressure, in an effort to effect domestic change in the USSR
and to wait out the eventual collapse of the regime. His
analysis crystallized the incoherent observations, concerns and fears
adrift in Washington, and containment was seized on as the means of
response. This came in the form of using the atomic bomb as a
means of real or threatened coercion as well as the acquisition of
bases around the Soviet perimeter.
3. The Triple Whammy of 1949-50:
Between August 1949 and June 1950, three things happened which
convinced Washington that Communism was expanding relentlessly and
World War Three was imminent. First, the Soviets detonated their
first atomic bomb, thus ending the American nuclear monopoly.
Second, in December 1949, the Chinese Communists entered Beijing and
took control of China, while the Nationalists fled to Taiwan as well as
Burma and Thailand. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded the
South and rapidly occupied most of the country. Most people were
certain that Moscow and Beijing had an active hand in this, the first
step toward a Communist world empire.
4. NSC-68 and the militarization of U.S. politics: This
was the context in which NSC-68, written largely by Paul Nitze, became
the blueprint for containment. Oddly, when it was first presented
to President Truman, he read it and sent it back to be revised.
Among other things, it proposed increasing the defense budget from $12
billion to about $50 billion (more than $500 billion in 2004 dollars),
something that could not be done. The Korean War, however,
altered the strategic terrain, and Congress willingly voted the
increase. But even more oddly, most of that money did not go to
Korea or to the French war in Indochina; instead, it went mostly to arm
the European allies. It also had the salutary effect of boosting
the economy and solved the problem of how to get dollars into the hands
of those most likely to buy American goods, especially military ones
(more on this below and in the next lecture).
III. Scaring the Hell Out of the American Public and Others
1. Securing the realm--the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall
Plan: The
primary problem after the end of World War II was not security but the
economy. Western Europe, in particular, was short of dollars with
which to purchase American goods, and there were not enough goods and
raw materials available from European countries and their colonies to
provide the required dollars. Both the Truman Doctrine and the
Marshall Plan were programs to funnel dollars abroad. The Truman
Doctrine directed about $500 million to Greece and Turkey to "fight
Communism" while the Marshall Plan sent about $13 billion (almost $150
billion in 2004$) to rebuild Europe. As we shall see, there was
an economic logic to this, although historically both are presented as
altruistic projects.
2. War scares and Red scares:
Fear of a repeat of the Great Depression was not enough to generate
broad public support for increased defense spending and loans; war
scares and fear of communism had to be thrown in. As Senator
Arthur Vandenberg told Truman prior to the latter's pronouncement of
his eponymous doctrine: "Scare the hell out of the American
public." Between the Korean War, the Red Scare, the hydrogen
bomb, and the bomber and missile gaps of the 1950s, the American public
seemed ready to support almost anything, so long as it was essential to
containment.
3. Planning for the end of the world: Still,
knowledge that we could blast the Soviet Union into smoking rubble in
under two hours was not strategy; it was an atomic orgasm.
President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, authored
the notion of "massive retaliation" which, in effect, threatened the
end of the world "at a time and place of our own choosing" in response
to any Soviet provocation. This was a threat, many recognized,
that could not be delivered. As a result, Defense Department
strategists and others worked long and hard to figure out how to "use"
nuclear weapons. The result was such a baroque system of
weaponry, delivery systems, and programs that even those who advocated
them did not always believe in them.
4. Missile madness:
This was most evident in the buildup of intercontinental ballistic
missiles. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 terrorized both
the U.S. government and the American public, for it meant that the USSR
could now deliver nuclear weapons to the other side of the world (that
is, onto American cities). In response, the U.S. launched an
emergency ICBM program to meet what turned out to be an imagined
"missile gap." John Kennedy ran on this issue in 1960 and, even
though the gap was fictional, and Richard Nixon knew it, the truth did
not come out until 1961. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was, in
part, a result of the public announcement that the gap was in America's
favor--Khrushchev decided to try to right the imbalance by putting the
missiles in Cuba.
IV. Vietnam and Other Tales of the First Cold War
1. "Never get involved in a land war in Asia": After
the North Koreans almost took all of South Korea, the United States,
leading UN forces, counter-attacked. General Douglas MacArthur
led an invasion at Inchon and drove the North Korean forces back almost
all the way to the Chinese border. At that point, Communist
Chinese forces entered the war and drove the UN forces back to the
south. The war bogged down in stalemate around the 43rd parallel,
about where the border had been before the war. The lesson
learned was to stay out of land wars in Asia. That lesson was too
late for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which began even before the
Korean War.
2. Peace in Europe, war around the edges: Even
as the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces faced each other across the
East-West dividing line--a standoff that ended after 40 years without a
shot being fired--proxy wars broke out along the margins. In
Vietnam, where U.S. forces came to replace the French, the war began
around 1946 and did not end until 1975. Between the exit of
French forces in 1954, and the entry of American advisors in the late
1950s, there were a few years of relative peace, but containment of
Communism eventually demanded that the U.S. make a major stand in
Indochina. By 1967, there were 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; by
1972, more than 40,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese had
died. Other proxy wars--Angola, Mozambique, Central America,
Afghanistan-- broke out and continued until well into the 1990s.
3. The Nixon Doctrine:
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran for President promising a secret plan to end
the Vietnam War. In fact, he had no plan except to try to force
the North into peace negotiations. At the same time, he announced
that, henceforth, the U.S. would rely on its allies to contain enemies
and fight wars, and would provide financial and military assistance to
this end. In Vietnam, it was called "Vietnamization"; in the
Persian Gulf, the Nixon Doctrine. But, in the end, U.S. air power
and aid was not enough to save South Vietnam and, in April 1975, it
fell to the forces of North Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia followed
not long thereafter.
4. The Fall of Kissinger: The
Nixon Doctrine was part of Henry Kissinger's effort to normalize
relations with both China and the Soviet Union. As noted before,
detente with the USSR and rapproachment with the Peoples Republic of
China were his version of realpolitik, an effort to create a three-way
balance of power that recognized the interests of all three
powers. It also helped that Chinese-Soviet relations were very
poor, a result of their falling out in the late 1950s and several
cross-border military battles in the late 1960s. But in the
context of the economic problems of the 1970s, detente appeared to some
a sign of weakness rather than prudence, and Kissinger was attacked
from both left and right. Many thought he deserved to fall, and
some called him a "war criminal" for the actions of the United States
in Indochina.
IV. The Return of the Cold War
1. Strategic nuclear parity and "Team
B": The Committee on the Present Danger was a revival of an
older group of the same name, established in the 1950s. It
consisted of those who we today call "neoconservatives," who were
reacting to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the apparent
waning of U.S. authority in the face of economic crisis, and what they
believed to be rapid growth in Soviet military power. Under
pressure from the CPD, President Ford appointed a "Team B" to evaluate
CIA data on Soviet power (the CIA was "Team A"). Team B
recalculated the numbers and claimed that the USSR was devoting a much
higher fraction of its national income to defense than was the United
States, and would sooner or later surpass America. This, coupled
with growing numbers and power of Soviet nuclear missiles created what
was called a "Window of Vulnerability," through which the enemy might
jump and Finlandize Europe and even America.
2.
The conversion of Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis:
Carter resisted the pressures of the CPD, but during the last two years
of his term, turned into a New Cold Warrior. The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Shah's regime in Iran, and the
Iranian hostage crisis made him a late convert to the supposedly
growing Soviet threat. In 1980, he was unable to be more of a
Cold Warrior than Ronald Reagan, who won the election and went on to
oversee the major military buildup started by Carter.
3. The fight for Afghanistan: In
geopolitical terms, Afghanistan came to be seen as a new "pivot
point." While the Soviets went in to assist a "fraternal marxist
regime," the West saw the continuation of the old Russian desire for a
warm water port, from which it could "break out" into the World
Ocean. From there, the Middle East oil fields would be
threatened, the Horn of Africa would become a source of attack on
shipping lanes, and revolution in South Africa would eliminate Western
access to critical strategic materials. Given this calculus, the
United States (along with Saudi Arabia and others) threw in billions of
dollars to fund the Afghani Mujuhadeen who caused the Soviets enough
pain to lead Mikhael Gorbachev to order withdrawal. Whether this
was a victory or not for the mujuhadeen, it created the infrastructure
that laid waste to Afghanistan, resulted in the rise of the Taliban,
and provided haven for Al Qaeda. Some victory!
4. Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire:
Reagan had two overriding goals as President. First, to eliminate
the welfare state through increased military spending, tax cuts, and
massive budget deficits. Second, to reassert American military
superiority over the USSR. To this end, the first few years of
his Presidency involved a great deal of nuclear saber-rattling, and
much public discomfort with the possibility of nuclear war.
Describing the USSR as an "evil empire" that would lie, cheat and
steal, he made clear his wish to see it end up on the "ashheap of
history." The Republicans also tried to run the Soviet Union into
bankruptcy although, in retrospect, it is clear that the USSR was
already in deep economic trouble even during the 1970s. To defuse
public anxiety over his nuclear policies, Reagan proposed the Strategic
Defense Initiative, aka "Star Wars," which would provide an
"impenetrable shield" against ballistic missiles. The European
peace movement was not much mollified by this, but in the United
States, there was a significant decline in anti-nuclear activism.
5. The end comes quickly: Once
Mikhael Gorbachev became Chair of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1985, U.S.-Soviet relations began to warm up rather
quickly. Initially, the White House was very suspicious of
Gorbachev but, eventually, his program to liberalize and open up the
Soviet Union could not be denied. At a summit in Reykjavik in
1986, Reagan and Gorbachev even agreed to make substantial nuclear
reductions. The Americans backed out, but the momentum for
agreements was considerable. By 1989, Gorbachev had announced the
end of the Brezhnev Doctrine--the Soviet equivalent of the Monroe
Doctrine--and the Berlin Wall came down. The rest, as they say,
was epilogue.
6. What ended the Cold War?
Alternative explanations
i) The collapse of the Soviet economy
ii) The delegitimation of Communist Party rule in the USSR
iii) The arms race, especially SDI
iv) Or historical processes (see, especially, the article on
Marx and Schumpeter)
5/4: The Economic Substructure
I. Avoiding another Great Depression
1. The gold standard and international liquidity:
Between the two world wars, the industrialized world attempted to
maintain a gold standard. As was the case in the late 1800s, this
tended to limit the international supply of hard currencies and
consumer demand. When the world's economies went into a chronic
state of over-production of goods and commodities, while many did not
have the gold or foreign exchange or access to credit to import goods,
economies started to collapse. This resulted in the closing off
of fascist economies as well as the collapse of economies in democratic
states.
2. No lender of last resort: The
problem, as it was analyzed decades later, was that there was no source
of loans to states that were suffering from exchange shortages.
To conserve funds, these states imposed tariffs on imports, which
dampened demand and led to surpluses. American bankers were leery
of making such loans, and the American government had not yet gotten
into the business. So, the Depression intensified and, according
to the wisdom of the 1940s, was a direct cause of World War II.
3. This means war! In
both Europe and Asia, Germany and Japan sought to establish autarchic
systems in which they would trade industrial goods for raw materials
and food with other states. In Mitteleuropa, Germany set up such
arrangements with Eastern European states while, in Japan, the same
applied in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Fearing
that the U.S. would be shut out of Asia, the U.S. began to put economic
pressure on Japan, eventually including an oil embargo. The
result was the attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into the war.
4. Structural power and the American Mission:
What became obvious during the war, especially to economists such as
John Maynard Keynes, was that the United States would be in a unique
position to dictate the structure of the international economy after
the war. As the only country largely undamaged by the war, and
the supplier of a potential "reserve currency" that could be used by
others to buy U.S. goods, other countries would largely be subordinate
to American desires and visions.
II. Economy and the Cold War
1. The problem of the post-war dollar shortage: The
immediate problem after the war was getting dollars into the
hands of foreign governments and consumers. Many countries held
balances of British pounds sterling, but the UK was broke and had
little to sell to these countries, who were very interested in
acquiring industrial goods. At the end of the war, the British
asked the United States for a $500 million loan (about $5-10 billion in
2004$) that would allow it to support the pound and, it was hoped,
encourage the continued holding of sterling. In the event, the
funds were depleted within months, and sterling became a "soft"
currency again. The European currencies were also "soft," and
could only be used in barter arrangements between countries. Some
way had to be found to provide Europe with the dollars that would make
reconstruction possible, and increase exports of American goods.
2. The Bretton Woods objectives: The
Bretton Woods system was designed with this liquidity problem in
mind. Its four major components were each intended to lubricate
international trade. The International Monetary Fund was to
provide loans to rectify short-term trade imbalances; the World Bank
was to provide loans for industrial reconstruction in Europe; the
International Trade Organization (ITO, later replaced by the GATT) was
to provide a multilateral forum within which bilateral trade agreements
and most-favored nation status could be negotiated, with an eye toward
freer trade; and the exchange system was intended to fix exchange rates
so that countries did not have to accumulate dollars in order to import
goods. VIRTUALLY NONE OF THESE INSTITUTIONS FUNCTIONED AS
INTENDED UNTIL WELL INTO THE 1950s.
3. The
Berlin Crisis: The Western Powers recognized that European
industrial reconstruction would not occur until Germany was rebuilt and
integrated into Western Europe. Toward this end, in 1947,
Britain, France and the U.S. decided to introduce a currency reform in
their occupation zones ("Trizonia"), exchanging new Deutschmarks for
old Reichsmarks. The Russians refused to participate and, fearing
that a flood of old currency would destabilize their zone, restricted
access to Berlin and what would later become East Germany. This
blockade, intended to undo the currency reform, led to both the Berlin
Airlift and the Marshall Plan. The United States suggested that
it might use atomic weapons to halt the blockade, too, but the Russians
eventually backed down.
4. Providing liquidity through grants, loans and aid:
But the model was set--between the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall
Plan, more than $12 billion was loaned or granted to countries in
Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey, matched by internal sources of
investment from the Marshall Plan countries. Even this was not
enough and, as noted earlier, it was not until the outbreak of the
Korean War and the provision of military aid that the international
supply of dollars became large enough to supply the needs of the
world. The European currencies did not become fully convertible
until 1958 and, by then, the world was beginning to suffer from a
dollar glut.
5. Point IV--Third World Development: The
Truman Administration also looked to developing sources of raw
materials and markets in the former colonies of Europe. In his
1948 Inaugural Address, he announced Point IV, a program of U.S. aid
and assistance directed toward "development." Part of the idea
here was that these countries could sell commodities to the U.S. in
return for dollars, they would use the dollars to buy consumer goods
from Europe, and the Europeans would then have currency to buy
industrial goods from the United States. This "triangular trade"
was particularly important with respect to France, and provided one
impetus for American military support to the French war in Indochina
from about 1948 to 1954.
III. Vietnam interlude
1. The Vietnam War illustrates the intersection between economy
and strategy:
As noted above, support for French reoccupation of Indochina was
premised on the desire to gain access to raw materials and to inject
dollars into the international economy. This conflicted, of
course, with the supposed U.S. commitment to decolonization--divide and
conquer--which would allow American funding of Point IV and Third World
development. Between about 1946 and 1952, the U.S. provided
France with more than $2 billion in assistance in fighting in Vietnam,
to no avail.
2. Between 1954 and 1970, anticommunist idealism drove American
intervention:
After their defeat at Dien Bein Phu in 1954, the French withdrew to the
southern part of Vietnam and, at the Geneva Conference of that year, it
was agreed that, by 1956, there would be elections throughout
Vietnam. Recognizing that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh
(forerunners of the Viet Cong) would win such an election, the U.S.
refused to hold them and, instead, put Ngo Dinh Diem, a Northern
Catholic, in office as President of South Viet Nam. This
backfired as Diem sought to wipe out communists in the South and
triggered an uprising that quickly drew in the North. In this
context, the U.S. began to send in military advisors, all in the name
of stopping communism, and especially "Red Chinese expansion," in
Southeast Asia. The war expanded until there were more than
500,000 U.S. troops there.
3. After 1970, the U.S. attempted to extricate itself through
"Vietnamization" and detente: The
Nixon Administration sought "peace with honor." This meant making
it appear as though the U.S. had not cut and run. Through bombing
of the North, Nixon and Kissinger tried to force peace
negotiations. Eventually, these began in Paris, in 1972 (they
could have begun in 1968, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
made it impossible). The U.S. was, meanwhile, reducing troop
strength and providing air cover and equipment for ARVN forces, who
proved largely unable to prevent gains by the communist forces.
Nixon's trip to China, and detente, were intended, in part, to reduce
Soviet and Chinese aid to the North--this had little effect on the
outcome: in April 1975, South Vietnam fell and the country was
unified. Cambodia and Laos were take over by communist regimes
shortly thereafter. But no other dominoes fell.
4. Vietnam hastened the economic crisis of the 1970s (see below). Part
of the reason for pulling out of Vietnam was to reduce spending and the
flow of dollars out of the country. Ironically, the war in
Vietnam played a role not only in the end of the Bretton Woods exchange
system but also in the energy crisis of the 1970s.
IV. The dollar glut
1. How the gold exchange standard operated:
The international economic system was based on a system in which the
dollar was the reserve currency, and was backed by gold, at $35 per
ounce. While U.S. citizens were not permitted to hold gold or
gold currency, others were, and governments could redeem their dollars
for gold from Fort Knox. The hope was that, knowing such
redemption was possible at any time, governments would not feel the
need to ask for gold. This meant that more dollars could
circulate than there was gold to back them up (about $10 billion worth).
2. The Triffin Dilemma: The problem
was, as an economist named Robert Triffin pointed out, that as the
number of dollars in international trade and exchange grew, the
fraction of each dollar actually covered by gold declined. There
was no domestic source of gold to add to reserves, and new gold from
abroad was limited. This mattered only if some government
demanded its gold, for then others governments, fearing a devaluation
of the dollar, might do the same. A run on U.S. gold reserves
would turn the dollar into worthless paper, and precipitate a new
global depression. What to do?
3. Vietnam and inflation: The
situation was exacerbated by escalation of the Vietnam War in
1965. Fighting the war cost about $20 billion per year ($150-odd
billion in 2004$), and President Johnson did not want to ask for a tax
increase in order to finance the war and sop up the increased money
supply. Altogether, the war pumped about $200 billion into the
international economy, and triggered a bout of inflation that, by the
end of the 1970s, was in the range of 10-15% per year.
4. Going off gold: The French
government, under President DeGaulle, was not happy about the dollar
glut and, in 1968, began to ask for its gold. Fearing that such
demands would begin to deplete the gold supply in Fort Knox, the Nixon
Administration devalued the dollar to $42/ounce in 1970 and, two years
later, suspended convertibility entirely. From that point on, the
dollar floated against other currencies, and it was no longer backed by
gold. This was the beginning of the accumulation crisis of the
1970s, during with the Bretton Woods system of "embedded liberalism"
essentially collapsed, to be eventually replaced by "neo-liberalism."
5. The Nixon Doctrine and the energy crisis: The
oil crisis of 1973 was linked to the dollar crisis of 1970. Under
the Nixon Doctrine, the Iran was to become the regional "policeman" to
protect American oil interests in the Persian Gulf. Nixon and
Kissinger saw this as a means of reducing U.S. military expenditures,
replacing British military power which had been withdrawn from the Gulf
a few years earlier, and recycling some oil revenues through sale of
U.S. armaments to the Shah. To finance these purchases, the Shah
demanded a small increase in oil prices; the U.S. agreed, but in the
negotiations between the oil companies and oil-producing countries, the
latter found it possible to impose much larger price increases, on the
order of $1-2 per barrel. Toward the end of 1973, in the wake of
the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, OPEC was able to increase the price of oil
to $12/barrel. This, of course, had all kinds of unforeseen
impacts on the international economy and America's structural power
(more on this in a couple of weeks).
IV. Accumulation crisis
1. The end of the golden age: The most
critical point--and one that will be developed next week--is that the
West was undergoing a structural crisis of capitalism at this time
(1970-80). The period between 1950 and 1970 had been a kind of
"golden age": vibrant economies, cheap oil, extensive trade. It
was also the height of the welfare state. By 1970, however,
things began to go sour. Innovation stalled, profit rates
declined, social costs soared. The crisis was visible, in
particular, in the UK, where industrial unions clashed with capital and
the government, eventually bringing the economy to bankruptcy--staved
off in 1976 only by an IMF structural adjustment loan--and the eventual
fall of Labour in 1978.
2. The rise of neo-liberalism:
What came to be called "Thatcherism"--after Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher--was what we today call "neo-liberalism." It is an
ideology whose origins can be found in Adam Smith's political economy,
as refined by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and implemented
globally under Ronal Reagan. In essence, the ideology involved,
first, the elimination of all possible social costs to capital, in
terms of regulated wages, social welfare costs, and bureaucracy; and
second, the transformation of the state into a much more active agent
of capital, through elimination of certain forms of regulation and the
more favorable structuring of the political economy. Thatcherism
also reified the individual, entrepreneurialism, and private
property As we shall see next week, this is all somewhat ironic
in view of the growing amalgamation of capital, in the form of
transnational corporations, that has taken place under this new "regime
of accumulation."