“The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot.”

—  John Gray

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

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John Gray 164
British philosopher 1948

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“In the Cold War, I was pro-American. The world needed a counter-weight to the evils of expansionist, imperial communism.”

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Context: In the Cold War, I was pro-American. The world needed a counter-weight to the evils of expansionist, imperial communism. (But I was never an American utopian. There's nothing new in humanity in this country — just a better system and more freedom, which tends to be the best corrective against sustained error.) After the Cold War, I saw no reason to oppose a prudent American policy of selective interventionism to deter evil and advance good a little, but even in the Balkans, such a policy did not require large numbers of ground troops and was enabled by strong alliances. After 9/11, I was clearly blinded by fear of al Qaeda and deluded by the overwhelming military superiority of the US and the ease of democratic transitions in Eastern Europe into thinking we could simply fight our way to victory against Islamist terror. I wasn't alone. But I was surely wrong. Haven't the last few years been a sobering learning experience? Haven't we discovered that allies actually are important, that fear is no substitute for cold assessment of self-interest, that saying something will happen is not that same thing as it actually happening?
That someone could come out of the last few years believing that Teddy Roosevelt's American imperialism is a model for the future is a little hard for me to understand.

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“The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism.”

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Interview with Nathan Gardels, The Huffington Post, September 16th 2008 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/stiglitz-the-fall-of-wall_b_126911.html?show_comment_id=15934161

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