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Like many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair\u2019s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium was a story of temporary dispensations mistaken for eternal truths: the definitive triumph of free market ideology; US military supremacy; a rules-based global order. As Jones recounts in his new book, these certainties would come crashing down over the next quarter of a century amid a succession of economic failures, foreign policy disasters and political crises.<\/p>\n
Indeed, \u201cthe west\u201d itself \u2013 as a\u00a0shorthand for the US plus the wealthier western European nations \u2013 feels almost quaint today, given the\u00a0increasing unilateralism of the administration in Washington. But in the 2000s it was part of the lexicon, as if the hemisphere were a political actor in its own right. Revisiting the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are reminded not just of their horrific death tolls (totalling half a million, by conservative estimates) but also their total strategic failure; the 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport, Jones writes, was \u201camong the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world\u201d.<\/p>\n
In addition to destabilising the region, these interventions weakened the foundations of the international legal system. As Jones points out, a precedent was set when Nato bombed Yugoslavia without UN security council authorisation in 1999; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, also without authorisation, further undermined the UN. So when Vladimir Putin subsequently invaded Ukraine on his own dubious pretext, western objections could be dismissed as hypocrisy. Perhaps the most ignominious example of western indifference to the international rule of law was Keir Starmer\u2019s limp assertion that Israel had the \u201cright\u201d to cut off water and electricity to 2 million civilians in Gaza \u2013 a war crime \u2013 in retaliation for Hamas\u2019s attacks on 7 October 2023.<\/p>\n
Alongside these geopolitical catastrophes, Jones tells a story of\u00a0domestic decline, of western economies built on chronic insecurity and precarious employment. In the 2000s, Thatcherite policies pursued by\u00a0New Labour fleeced the public: \u201cEssential services [were] turned into assets designed to generate returns. Passengers paid more for overcrowded trains. Rivers and seas were fouled while water companies loaded themselves with debt and paid out dividends.\u201d Then came the 2008 financial crisis and the bankers\u2019 bailout, paid for by austerity. In Britain\u00a0and elsewhere, Jones notes a\u00a0\u201ccorrelation between the inability of\u00a0centrist governments to tackle economic decline in any meaningful way, and the rise of the far right\u201d.<\/p>\n
double quotation markFor decades, electorates have been mis-sold a fanatical ideology<\/p>\n
The book is interspersed with snippets of interviews with an assortment of eyewitnesses, journalists, scholars and activists. They include the director of Iraq national museum in Baghdad, a\u00a0former Lehman Brothers employee, a\u00a0former head of the Afghan Red Crescent, the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, and the conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, a repentant cheerleader for the Iraq war, who admits: \u201cI was wrong on the major issues, on the morality of it and the practicality of it and the reason for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of this terrain \u2013 Bush and Blair\u2019s wars, the financial crash, the populist surge \u2013 has been extensively covered. The average well-informed reader will learn nothing new, but it is bracing to see what was once the news cycle take its place in the sweep of history, and Jones\u2019s focus on free-market fundamentalism provides a compelling through-line. He suggests the second Trump administration, in all its cynical venality, is \u201cthe logical endpoint\u201d of that philosophy. And he\u00a0reminds us that the aggressive privatisation of the Russian economy in the 1990s brought terrible economic hardship which ultimately fuelled Putin\u2019s revanchist nationalism.<\/p>\n
For decades, electorates have been mis-sold a fanatical ideology: the prerogatives of the private sector must\u00a0override the collective interest, and anything less is tantamount to Stalinism. This remains orthodoxy, but the rise to prominence of Zohran Mamdani, the avowedly socialist mayor of New York, offers a glimmer of hope to those who, like Jones, would prefer a society built on \u201ccommon provision, democratic power, mutual obligation and the recognition that our fates are bound together\u201d.<\/p>\n