World Orders, Old and New

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War – the old order – came to an end. Or did it?

In this remarkable study of global politics, Noam Chomsky offers a devastating critique of conventional definitions of the ‘new world order’ so enthusiastically proclaimed by President Bush. It is, he argues, nothing more than an ingenious piece of ‘historical engineering’, whereby the pretexts for the Cold War – nuclear threat, Eastern Bloc menace – have been deftly replaced by a new set of convenient justifications for a Western agenda that remains largely unchanged. The United States, ‘a nation of almost unimaginable perfection’ in the eyes of its admirers, will continue to act as it always has, safeguarding the interests of its allies, its clients and the masters of the global economy, to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Chomsky draws together a wealth of historical detail in support of his argument, demonstrating with awesome clarity that the basic rules of world order remain as they always have been. As revisionist historians and commentators continue the work of reshaping past and current history – of the Gulf War, Bosnia, Palestine – World Orders, Old and New offers an impressive and much-needed assault on the legitimacy of the status quo, old and new.