Pax Americana Research Articles

Hunger in global war economies: understanding the decline and return of famines.

The resurgence of famines is a topic of concern. This paper explains the recent trajectory using the framework of contending 'global war economies'. It characterises the unipolar neoliberal world order era (1986-2015) as the 'Pax Americana' war economy, focusing on the United States dollar's roles. These were the decades of the liberal imperium, the corporate food regime, and counterinsurgent coalitions, which generated structural vulnerability to food crises and reduced the actual incidence and lethality of famine. The paper characterises the subsequent period (2016 onwards) as the challenge of the BRICS club, focusing on its efforts to rewrite the global political economy's rules, proactively hedging among diversifying currency regimes. This entails a scramble to secure strategic commodities and infrastructure in subaltern countries, which is intensifying conflict and food insecurity, and revising international norms in favour of reasserting sovereign rights. The global political-economic contestation and, especially, the associated normative regression are permissive of political and military triggers of famine.

From co-produced hegemony to coerced imperial governance

ABSTRACT This paper is inspired by recent analyses of the nature of imperial power that unbundle it from the modes of global governance performed by European rulers in the ‘Age of Empire’. While maintaining the defining features of the concept, it argues that today’s global Pax Americana is constituted by a variety of legal regulatory instruments that define the topography of an imperial regime through strategies of inclusion/exclusion that dilute the national and economic sovereignty of the targeted community or state. The argument is fleshed out by applying it as a grille de lecture to four existing case studies published by historians of science and technology, including my own. The regulatory systems they describe evolved from a classic metropolitan-periphery mode of colonial subordination (in the case of Hawaiʻi in the early twentieth century), through a US–UN brokered legal status of strategic trusteeship to legitimate the use of the Marshall islands to destructively test weapons after World War Two, to the use of export controls and other regulatory instruments to control the transnational flow of US-origin knowledge, know-how and technical data in the nuclear and commercial fields.

Is “Taiwan” a psychoanalytic creation?

ABSTRACT The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but “peacefully” replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political “miracle.” My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana.

The Small Wars Doctrine of the US Marine Corps and Colonial Experience of the European Powers

The rapid transformation of the current world order excites renewed interest of the expert community in the phenomenon of empire (as a form of the organization of political life). And since the United States plays a central role in this transformation, the history of the Pax Americana, its formation and development, both at the level of the idea and in the field of real politics is of particular relevance. The author argues that clarification of the role and significance of the colonial background in the projection of US military-political power in the late 19th — early 21st centuries allows for better understanding of the theory and practice of international relations both in the era of ‘high imperialism’ and world wars of the 20th century, and in the context of transition from global colonial empires to nuclear superpowers. It may also be instrumental in addressing the deepening contradictions between advocates of a ‘global leadership’ concept and proponents of a multipolar world during the post-Cold War period. In this regard, the paper examines the works of the US military theorists of the late 19th − first half of the 20th centuries that focused on the colonial experience of the leading European powers, as well as the experience gained from interventions involving the US Army and Marine Corps. Special emphasis is given to the concept of ‘small wars’. Building on a wide array of primary sources, presented both by the works of military experts, direct participants in various counterinsurgency operations in the colonies, as well as by the teaching materials and field manuals of the US Marine Corps, the author traces the evolution of this concept which implied establishment of external management and/or control through military and police measures. This allows the author to restore the historical genealogy of current models of internal security promoted in American foreign policy in conditions of proliferating, protracted, and increasingly hybrid civil conflicts. The author concludes that in the interwar period the US law enforcement agencies pragmatically implemented the relevant experience of global empires in Latin American countries within the framework of the Monroe Doctrine, while regarding European powers as political rivals. It is noted that conflicting imperatives of asymmetric and conventional threats to US national security urge researchers and practitioners to revisit after a post-Vietnam period of neglect the approaches of colonial empires to the conduct of small wars and to adapt them to modern conditions. The findings broaden the understanding of the modern leading powers’ approaches to internal security models transfer, as well as of its limits.

Covid-19 and the Clash of Narratives: From Cold War to End of Time (1989-2023)

This paper discusses the impact of Covid-19 on Islamist narratives of end time scenarios that predict the annihilation of a corrupted world and its ultimate replacement by a world order based exclusively on Islam. It does this against the backdrop of Islam’s antagonistic relationship with the West, particularly from the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s to the present day, a relationship conducted within the shadow of the US’s attempts to establish a new world order based exclusively on its own values and interests. In the light of the contrary predictions of Francis Fukuyama that the resulting Pax Americana will bring a century of peace and S. P. Huntington a century of conflict, the paper goes on to examine the vastly different world views of the United States on the one hand and Al Qaeda and Islamic State on the other and how they envisage the future unfolding. What the paper shows is that the advent of Covid-19 has served not only to convince traditional Islamic Scholars that Al Mahama, the great battle at the end of time, is well on the way and may even have started, but also to make Muslims in the streets more receptive to such a doomsday message.

“Re-membering” South Korea’s Militarized Landscapes in Pax Americana: Post-Cold War US Military Camps, Camptowns, and Former Camptown Women

The continued US military presence for nearly eighty years in South Korea has produced militarized landscapes of postcoloniality in South Korea. Here, militarized landscapes denote both official American military camps and their vernacular camptowns (kijich'on) as well as social-cultural expressions affected by this spatial militarization, such as the former camptown women’s experiences. As the contours of these militarized borderlands are shifting today with the consolidating of the American military footprint in South Korea, this study seeks to connect these contemporary manifestations with their historical developments. In so doing, it hopes to contribute to what Homi Bhabha conceptualizes as “re-membering”－ “a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.” While camps are becoming even more insulated Americanized spaces and the once marginalized camptowns are caught in a liminal stride toward internationalism, this study examines how these borderlands, which had not only embodied Korea’s coloniality but also catalyzed changes in the greater bilateral relations, are “re-membered.” It then discusses how former kijich'on women and civic organizations that constitute the “Camptown Women’s Human Rights Coalition” are at the forefront of this postcolonial “re-membering.” Through the subjectivity-formation and trans-border activism of those once rendered voiceless victims sacrificed by the state, the former camptown women themselves have demonstrated how they are the main agents of their own historical integration. Their re-membering, moreover, contributes to bringing to the national center the marginalized history of Korea’s militarized landscapes in Pax Americana, which in turn forces us to re-member our shared postcolonial trauma.

The Power of Unintended Consequences: Strategic Naïvety, China and the End of the US Empire

AbstractThe decline of major global empires has frequently rested upon an act of strategic naïvety. Such an action or decision, although innocuous at the time, results many decades later in those empires collapsing. History is punctuated by examples of great powers that have misjudged the intentions of a rising power, leading to a highly adversarial relationship. Such unintended consequences can be seen in United States policy towards China, which has allowed Beijing to emerge as a clear competitor that is threatening to usurp US hegemony. This article considers these dynamics across seven major empires, dating from ancient Carthage circa 814 BC to modern day Pax Americana. By connecting the past to the present, we find that comparable acts of strategic naïvety by other empires are now increasingly evident in current US‐China relations, and which have often occurred for similar reasons.

The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism by Naoki Sakai (review)

The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism by Naoki Sakai (review)

Posle biopolitike - prava demokratija kao "svet životaˮ XXI veka

In this article the author, firstly, considers different aspects of contemporary neoliberalism as biopolitics, especially reflecting the issue of cryptodemocracy in the end of 20th as well as in the first decades of 21st century. Or, more precisely, beginning from Foucault's articulation of biopolitics as both regulation and control of population, the issue of multiple forms of "liberal democracy" in neoliberalism and poststructualism is critically addressed. In this light, divergent forms of "liberal democracy" as procedural i.e., formal democracy which appears as the primary condition of possibility for biopolitical neototalitarianism are analyzed. This neototalitarianism of the West i.e., of Pax Americana, which simultaneously includes the project of the EU, is primarily manifested through numerous contemporary phenomena of biopolitics - from "humanitarian interventionism" to "wars against terrorism" and measures taken against COVID 19. The common ground for all phenomena is traced back to the "friend-enemy" distinction, as well as to politization of the body as the conditions which enabled de(con)struction of both homo politicus and democracy. It is emphasized that the structural binary opposition is one between East and West and that, moreover, biopolitical neototalitarianism targets precisely the otherness of the East which it perceives as unbearable. In the second part of the article, it is argued that reaffirmation of polis requires a theory and practice of "true democracy" - as "democracy of content" - which is conceptually different from any form of "formal democracy". Furthermore, true democracy is, first and foremost, articulated as politics of the local i.e., as both politics of place and politics of time. Therefore, in opposition to "neoliberal presentism" and "the end of history" a return to democracy falls in one with rebirth of history. Transcendence of time and immanence of space constitute the framework for comprehending knowledge as remembrance which, in the next step, enables the foundation of a new paideia for the 21st century. Or, in other words, special relevance of education for true democracy - as well as for the structural relation between the political and the normative element - is emphasized. In such a way, the author at the same time reflects upon the necessity of culture for true democracy and formation of the polis because culture - which always comes in plural - is the sine qua non not only for politics and ethics but for the possibility of civilization. The potential for realization of political subjectivity and sovereignty is then presented in the form of true democracy as self-determination of the people. In conclusion, this process is also marked by forming of specific Sittlickeit i.e., "democracy of content" is manifested through multiplicity of forms of "lifeworld" which come forth from history, tradition, and high culture. In such a way, the life of the people as democratic life par excellence, with all its particularities, opens the space for horizons of new humanism in the 21st century that is also constituted as the final foundation for restauration of homo politicus.

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana Lisa Szefel (bio) Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 2021. 880 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting [End Page 408] democracy into reverse. In the wake of this wheelspin, new articulations of freedom gained traction. Menand’s Tolstoyan epic examines a geometry of “vertical cross-sections” and “horizontal through-lines” (p. xiv), which unveils a deep and broad panorama. What results is not War and Peace, but a series of Polaroid snapshots, a device created in 1948 as one of the era’s technological innovations. Menand captures the moments when creators conceived their art: Jean-Paul Sartre jumping into the void; Jackson Pollock tossing a canvass on the floor; Merce Cunningham chucking choreography for chance. Critics charted this new territory, explaining films, explicating texts, criticizing consumerism, unveiling misogyny, and diagnosing racism. A second goal animates the inquiry: the education Menand absorbed from his parents, a more activist and elevated version of the kind of general readers Joan Shelley Rubin illustrated in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992). Considering art and thought in the Cold War might, Menand suggests, render a more complete portrait of his own subjectivity. What launched the notion that ideas matter? Menand argues that it began with George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram,” which laid out in despairing detail the inherently expansionist nature of Communist ideology. With little hope of peaceful coexistence, only a policy of “vigilant containment” offered protection against yet another global conflagration. Among the first to gauge Atomic Age geopolitical threats was George Orwell whose attempt to join a Communist cell became fodder for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell chronicled his battle against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, while the now-canonical Animal Farm (1948) and 1984 (1949) illuminated the despotic impact of Stalinist cant and dissimulation. Eastern bloc consolidation gave ballast to the publishing fortunes of another political prognosticator, Hannah Arendt. Her etiology of...

현대 러시아 학계의 지정학: 형성과 특징

The purpose of this paper is to trace the formation process of geopolitics as a science and to examine its characteristics in Russian academia after the collapse of the USSR. Geopolitics, banned in the Soviet Union, has become academically and publicly popular since the 1990s. A series of political processes at home and abroad, such as the dissolution of the Soviet statehood and the formation task of a new statehood, and the structure of unipolarity and the Pax Americana, are arousing the geopolitical interest of politicians, scholars, and the public. As the metadiscourse(socialism) that explained and judged domestic and international political processes lost its power, geopolitics is splendidly reviving as a new paradigm, explanatory framework.BR As geopolitical research and education are institutionalized to a certain level in Russia, the need for a Russian geopolitical school that is free from Western geopolitical logic and concepts is being raised. In this process, characteristics such as stratification in the times, cross-scholarship in methodology, and state-centrism in logic are revealed. Various trends such as natural geography, civilization theory, military strategy, and ideology overlap in Russian academic circles. This is not being formed as a single logic but as an emergent assembladge consisting of a set of innumerable sub-logics.BR Russia

Who lost Ethiopia? The unmaking of an African anchor state and U.S. foreign policy

ABSTRACT In November 2020, Ethiopia descended into full-scale civil war which, owing to mass atrocities and regional intervention, metastasized into among the most acute humanitarian emergencies in the world. The violent fragmentation of state authority tarnished Ethiopia’s internationally sanctioned role as regional peacekeeper and developmental leader—an “anchor state” of the Pax Americana in the Horn of Africa. While acknowledging the complex, multi-dimensional origins of the conflict, this article examines how efforts by the U.S. government to reinvent the strategic relationship during the 2018–2020 political transition in Addis Ababa helped pave the road to war. We argue that U.S. policymakers provided largely unconditional support to Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, creating problems of moral hazard that encouraged confrontation between rival political forces. The story of U.S. engagement in Ethiopia in this period illustrates the perils of Washington’s efforts to rebalance fraught relations with its most important regional anchors.

50th Anniversary of TPRC—Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy: Looking Ahead to the Next 50 Years

50th Anniversary of TPRC—Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy: Looking Ahead to the Next 50 Years

Nation, Damned Nation and Statistics

Abstract The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)’s main objective is to translate the Bible into all languages by collecting ethnolinguistic data thanks to the methods of participant-observation and lexical investigation. Tracing its origins to the mid-1930s in the United States and Central America, SIL started its missionary, linguistic and development activities in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, especially in the Philippines (1953) and Vietnam (1954). This article analyses the nature and trajectories of SIL members, investigating their missionary activities, their visual and statistical conception of conversion and ethnographic encounter, their conception of Pax Americana during the Vietnam war (1954–75). Both archive- and fieldwork-based investigation reveal what the SIL’s activity meant at the nexus of evangelism, linguistics, ethnography and US foreign policy, challenging some of the very simplified views of the operations of missionaries and religious NGO s in Southeast Asia during the Cold War.

William Howard Taft and the Philippines: A Blueprint for Empire by Adam D. Burns

Reviewed by: William Howard Taft and the Philippines: A Blueprint for Empire by Adam D. Burns Dean Kotlowski William Howard Taft and the Philippines: A Blueprint for Empire. Adam D. Burns. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-6219-0569-1. 189 pp., hardcover, $70.00. William Howard Taft has kept book publishers rather busy over the past decade or so. The Ohio-born president has surfaced in popular histories, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin's sprawling The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). And academics have spotlighted overlooked aspects of Taft's life; a good example is Lewis L. Gould's monograph Chief Executive to Chief Justice: Taft betwixt the White House and Supreme Court (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). Taft's time in the Philippines was the subject of Rene R. Escalante's Bearer of the Pax Americana: The Philippine Career of William H. Taft, 1900–1903 (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 2007). Now, Adam Burns has written a thoughtful study of Taft's policies toward the Philippines across the Ohioan's entire political career. Burns posits three theses, all more or less persuasive: Taft possessed a vision for the Philippines, he methodically pursued his ends, and he implemented what turned out to be "a failed policy" (2). Motivated by a sense of duty, Taft set aside a promising judicial career to serve on the Second Philippine Commission (1900–1904) and as governor-general of the islands (1901–1903). These assignments transformed the one-time skeptic of imperialism into an ardent champion of US control over the Philippines. Taft deemed Filipinos to be "quiet, lazy, polite, ordinarily inoffensive, rather light hearted people" who were "easily subject to immoral influences; quite superstitious, and if aroused at all exceedingly cruel" (19). Such racism led him to regard the Philippines as ill-suited to either independence or integration into the American metropole as a state. The better course was to give the islands a degree of internal self-government, or "dominion status," and an enduring relationship with the United States modeled after the one between Canada and Great Britain (47). Taft pushed such ideas throughout his political career. As governor-general, he espoused a "policy of attraction" designed to get Filipinos to reject independence and accept supposedly benevolent US rule (19). Taft mingled with Filipinos in a genial way, softened the color line at official functions, and encouraged the construction of schools. He appointed Filipinos to the commission (the colonial legislature's upper house) and cultivated the islands' educated elite and the pro–US Federal Party. To bind the Philippines to the United States, Taft, as president (1909–1913), liberalized trade between the two countries. All the [End Page 161] while, he convinced himself that these policies were good for the Philippines. A true-believing imperialist, Taft, as secretary of war (1904–1908), pushed back when President Theodore Roosevelt broached the possibility of Philippine independence. As a former president, he continued to resist moves in that direction during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. To advocates of independence, he preached delay. Borrowing a phrase from Democrat William Jennings Bryan, Burns labeled Taft "the Great Postponer" (80). Taft's policies proved largely unsuccessful. To be certain, he became well-liked by Filipinos during his governorship. Taft's experience in the Philippines broadened the Ohioan's horizons and padded his resume in ways that American voters found appealing. And talk of dominion status for the Philippines stretched into the 1930s, a fact Burns overlooks—along with the ways in which free trade tied the United States and the Philippines together for over a half century (and skewed the islands' economy). But, as Burns rightly notes, Filipinos found the policy of attraction to be unattractive. A sedition act, designed to quell talk of independence, had the reverse effect. Taft's decision to open the islands to greater numbers of Chinese immigrants, whom he thought worked harder than average Filipinos, spawned resentment. Furthermore, the Federal Party, which—contrary to Taft's wishes—backed statehood for the islands, never won popular support. Taft failed to convince either Filipinos or Americans to...

Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. Hamilton

Reviewed by: Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. Hamilton Kent Wan Peter E. Hamilton. Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 419 pp. Hardcover, ($140), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. At a time when mainland cities such as Shanghai appear poised to replace Hong Kong as China's preeminent metropolises, it certainly seems quaint to study a former British colony that has been plagued by political instability in recent years. Peter E. Hamilton, however, points out that Hong Kong was not only the engine that made possible Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms but also a vital linchpin of Sino-American trade relations, which have been fraying since Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency (2). The monograph under review is a historical work focusing on Sino-American economic ties that were nurtured by men of privilege who used British Hong Kong as a base of operations to enrich themselves through blossoming commercial interactions between China and the United States. Hamilton's work uses Hong Kong history as a case study to argue that it was not "Confucian values" such as "heightened levels of paternalism, discipline, and respect for education" that ensured the economic rise of the East Asian "tigers"; in the case of this city, the determined efforts of powerful and self-serving merchants put it on a path to prosperity that overwhelmingly benefited the economic elites (24, 221). Hamilton's work is the first to delineate the roles played by Chinese merchants in Hong Kong who cultivated relations with American businessmen, academics, and officials to create mutually beneficial commercial ties, so much so that by the 1970s the United States, not Britain, was the dominant economic power in Hong Kong (158–159). The analytical focus of Hamilton's monograph extends far beyond the history of Hong Kong, as—besides arguing that Hong Kong underwent a US-led "informal decolonization" in the 1970s due to the dominance of American companies and their local allies—he seeks to find in the city the origin story of Sino-American economic interdependence (14–15). In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, this monograph has eight chapters that are organized in chronological order to advance Hamilton's thesis concerning Hong Kong's emergence as the nexus of Sino-American trade relations from 1949 to 1997. Hamilton concentrates on the kuashang (跨商), or "straddling merchants," men originally from China who found themselves in Hong Kong and then utilized their personal networks, educational backgrounds, and financial resources not only to save their own companies during a period of regime change in China but also to establish dynasties that are still pillars of the city's ruling class (3, 283–84). Recognizing the imminent arrival of a pax Americana (as many of these kuashang had either served with Americans during the Second World War or attended elite American universities), they were determined to perpetuate the access their families had to American social and financial capital by sending their offspring to the United States to accumulate further professional or educational experiences (67–68, 216–17, 287). Hong Kong's kuashang brought American expertise and social and financial capital to Hong Kong through partnerships and business agreements with American firms, a process that was instrumental to the city's economic rise in the 1970s (193–95, 208). The economic importance of Hong Kong motivated Chinese leaders to promise the implementation of the "one country, two systems" formula after [End Page E-7] 1997 to ensure the maintenance of the city's capitalist economic system, which had become vital to China's liberalization, especially since the kuashang were important early investors in Guangdong even before Beijing's formal announcement of economic reforms (223, 227, 277). By the 1980s and 1990s, American companies often partnered with Hong Kong firms to make full use of low-wage workers in Guangdong to manufacture goods destined for the American market (220, 264–65). It is therefore not surprising that after the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989, Hong Kong's economic elites, in cooperation...

Navigating the Ruins of Pax Americana

Navigating the Ruins of Pax Americana

Nightmares of a Dying World and the Dream of a Counter‐Apocalypse

AbstractIn common parlance, an apocalypse refers to a calamity that signals the end. It represents a closure. But the original meaning in the biblical Greek is the opposite. Apocalypse means “revelation” or disclosure. It offers hope, not despair. For the early Christians facing persecution by the Roman Empire, hope was disclosed in a coded narrative that showed the hidden weakness of their tormentors. The “beast” of imperial power and the “great whore” of its global economy crash in mutual destruction. For us, the revelation we most need is reflexive: signs that will enable us to see clearly how our current civilization is self‐destructive. If the new Rome is the Pax Americana, the empire that the United States has imposed on much of the world in the name of democracy and freedom, the “whore of Babylon” is the global economy. Once again, what appears on the surface to be an unstoppable force of progress is the engine of its own destruction. Right‐wing Christians have inverted the vision, seeing, by analogy, the emperor as the one being persecuted. Rather than abandoning the apocalypse to reactionary literalizations or liberal paralysis, we may read it in terms of a counter‐apocalypse. Not a mere anti‐apocalypse, this symbolic strategy helps us to address such cataclysmic threats as climate change in the spirit of an honest hope, beyond panic or evasion.

Pax Americana: Palestine and the Middle East in the Trump Era

Abstract Peace between Israel and the Arab world appears to be progressing like never before. It started with the UAE, followed by Bahrain and Morocco, and then with Sudan. A “new” Middle East is finally becoming a reality. Yet, on the other hand, the colonization of Palestinian land is progressing at full speed ever since President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy there. During both the Embassy move and the so-called Abraham Accords with Arab countries and throughout the Trump era, biblical language has been employed. This paper will examine these political developments and biblical connotations. At the heart of the issue lies the question of what constitutes real peace. This paper argues that ‘the deal of the century’ was a form of Pax Romana rather than Pax Christi.

The Monopolar Paradigm in a Polycentric World, a Review of L. V. Savin’s Monograph Ordo Pluriversalis: The End of Pax Americana and the Rise of Multipolarity

Alexander Dugin, a thinker and leader of the international Eurasian movement, is confident that the best system of all is a multipolar world order, which is replacing “unipolarity.” Defending the multipolar model is the leitmotif of the book being analyzed—political scientist Savin’s Ordo Pluriversalis: The End of Pax Americana and the Rise of Multipolarity. The book is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the publication of Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy’s “Europe and Humanity”—the first, according to Dugin, genuinely Eurasian text by a Eurasian, and the first to “overcome the West from within.” Savin currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Geopolitica.ru, the informational, analytical e-publication portal whose ardent Orthodox pro-Eurasian position prompted the U.S. State Department to label this alternative political resource as a pillar of the “ecosystem of Russian propaganda and disinformation.”