“The regimes in [Pakistan and Saudi Arabia] are based on a coalition of support from pro-Western modernizing elites and an extremely conservative, popularly-based Islamic establishment. The regimes have maintained their stability because they have been able to juggle this combination. And they have been able to do so because of the ambivalence of their policies and their public pronouncements.

“The United States is now saying, away with ambiguities. The U.S. may prevail, no doubt. But in the process, the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan may find that their popular base is irremediably eroded….

“Consider that this may have been bin Laden’s plan. His own suicide mission may have been to lead the United States into this trap.”

I believe that Bin Laden has now achieved what he intended in Pakistan. The end of ambiguities has meant that Pakistan is no longer operating geopolitically in the interests of the United States. Quite to the contrary! It has taken its distances, and is pursuing policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere that the United States strongly opposes. One down, one to go.

What is happening in Saudi Arabia? There is no question that Saudi Arabia is recently acting somewhat more independently of the United States than it had been for the past seventy years or so. But it has still not broken definitively with the United States, as Pakistan has now done. Will it do so in the very near future? I think it may.

Consider the multiple internal dilemmas of the regime. The wealth of the top 10% or so of the Saudis has led to sharply increased demands on the state to “modernize” – most visibly in questions concerning women (the right to employment, the right to drive). But the demand for more rights for women is but the tip of the iceberg in a wider call to lessen the constraints of Wahhabi orthodoxy. As the king moves in a steady, but gingerly, fashion to meet these demands, he antagonizes the religious establishment ever more. They are getting quite restless.

In addition, the “modernizing” elite have still other complaints. The Saudi government is essentially a gerontocracy, run by people in their 70s and 80s. In the curious system of succession, the Saudi regime is somewhat like the old Soviet regime in the USSR. There is something akin to a real vote on succession, but it is a vote among a mere dozen or so people. The likelihood that real power can pass to persons in their 50s and 60s is extremely thin, if not impossible. Note however that the group of these “youngsters,” even just within the royal family, has grown considerably in numbers, and they are impatient. Could this lead to a serious split among the very top elite? Quite possibly.

The Saudi regime operates a sort of welfare state for the rest of its citizenry. However, the gap in income and wealth is growing there, just as everywhere in the world. And small increases in redistribution from time to time may merely whet the appetite for further demands rather than calming the lower strata. The middle and lower strata may even (surprise, surprise!) echo the calls of the Arab spring for “democracy.”

And then there’s the Shi’a minority. It is said to be only 10% or so of the population, but it’s probably larger, and more important it is strategically located in the southeast of the country where the largest oil reserves are located. Why should these Shi’a be the only Shi’a in Sunni-dominated countries in the Middle East not to pursue the claims of identity?

The Saudi regime has been trying to play a major role in the geopolitics of the region. They are unhappy about Iran’s policies and aspirations. They are unhappy about Assad’s intransigence in Syria. But they have been, when all is said and done, quite moderate in their approach to these issues in practice. They fear the consequences of dramatic moves. And they find U.S. policy too much governed by its internal needs, and its endless commitment to Israel.

On Israel, too, the Saudis have been very “reasonable.” They do not think their reasonableness has been much rewarded – either by Israel or the United States. They may be ready now to help Hamas in much more overt ways. They perceive nothing “reasonable” in the policies of the Israeli government, nor any prospects that these policies may change soon.

All of this does not add up to a politically stable regime. It certainly does not add up to one that can maintain the “ambiguities” that has permitted it to be an unflinching ally of the United States in the region.

One down, and one to go?

There are some who see China’s “rise” as the resumption of a central position on the globe, a central position that they once held and are now resuming. There are some who see it as something very recent – as China’s new role in the shifting geopolitics and world-economic relations of the modern world-system.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the relations between the two countries have been ambiguous. On the one hand, in that era, the United States began to expand its trade routes to China. It began to send Christian missionaries. At the turn of the twentieth century, it proclaimed the Open Door Policy which was less directed against China than against other European powers. The United States wanted its share of the spoils. However, very shortly thereafter, it participated along with the other western countries in putting down the Boxer rebellion against imperialist outsiders. And back home in the United States, the U.S. government (and the U.S. trade unions) sought to prevent Chinese from immigrating to the United States.

On the other hand, there was a certain grudging respect for Chinese civilization. The Far East (China plus Japan) were the preferred locus for missionary work, placed above India and Africa, and justified on the assumption that China was a “higher” civilization. It may also have something to do with the fact that neither China nor Japan were directly colonized for the most part and that therefore there was no European colonial power to try to reserve its colonies for its own nationals as proselytizers.

After the Chinese revolution of 1911, Sun Yat-Sen, who had lived in the United States, became a sympathetic figure in U.S. discourse. And by the time of the Second World War, China was seen as an ally in fighting Japan. Indeed, it was the United States that insisted that China receive a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. To be sure, when the Chinese Communist Party conquered mainland China and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), China and the United States seemed to become ferocious enemies. In the Korean War, they were on opposite sides, and it was the active military participation of China on the side of North Korea that ensured that the war would end in a deadlock.

Nonetheless, it was but a relatively short time later that Pres. Richard Nixon famously went to Beijing, met with Mao Zedong, and established a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union. The geopolitical world seemed to turn upside down. As part of the accord with the PRC, the United States broke its diplomatic relations with Taiwan (although it continued to stand guarantor against a PRC invasion across the straits). And when Deng Xiaoping became the leader of China, the country entered on a process of slowly opening to market operations and to integration in the trade currents of the capitalist world-economy.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union rendered irrelevant any Chinese-U.S. alliance against it, the relations between the two countries did not really change. They became, if anything, much closer. The situation in which the world finds itself today is that China has a significant balance of payments surplus with the United States, much of which it invests in U.S. Treasury bonds, thereby underwriting the ability of the U.S. government to continue to spend vast amounts of resources on its multiple military activities around the globe (and particularly in the Middle East), as well as to be a good customer for Chinese exports.

From time to time, the rhetoric each government currently uses about the other is a bit harsh, but nowhere near the rhetoric of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Still, it is never wise to pay too much attention to the rhetoric. In global affairs, rhetoric is usually intended primarily to have a political effect within one’s own countries, rather than reflecting true policy towards the country at which it is ostensibly aimed.

One should pay more attention to the actions of the two countries. Notice the following: In 2001 (just before 9/11), off Hainan Island, a Chinese plane and a U.S. plane collided. The U.S. plane had probably been spying on China. Some U.S. politicians called for a military response. President George W. Bush did not agree. He more or less apologized to the Chinese, obtaining the eventual return of the airplane and of the 24 captured U.S. airmen. In the various efforts of the United States to get the United Nations to support its operations in various ways, the Chinese often dissented. But they have never actually vetoed a resolution sponsored by the United States. Caution on both sides has seemed to be the preferred form of action, despite the rhetoric.

So where are we? China, as all the major powers today, has a multifaceted foreign policy, engaging with all parts of the world. The question is what its priorities are. I believe that priority number one is its relations with Japan and the two Koreas. China is strong, yes, but would be immeasurably stronger if it were to be part of a northeast Asian confederation.

China and Japan need each other, first of all as economic partners and secondly to ensure that there be no military confrontation of any kind. Despite occasional nationalist flare-ups, they have been visibly moving in this direction. The most recent move is the joint decision to trade with each other using their own currencies, thereby cutting out the use of the dollar, and insulating them from the ever more frequent fluctuations in the dollar’s value. Furthermore, Japan is weighing the uncertainty that the U.S. military umbrella may not last forever and it needs therefore to come to terms with China.

South Korea faces the same dilemmas as Japan, plus the thorny problem of how to deal with North Korea. For South Korea, China is the crucial constraint on the North Koreans. And for China, instability in North Korea would pose an immediate threat to its own stability. China can play for South Korea the role that the United States no longer can. And in the difficult adjustments of China and Japan to their desired collaboration, South Korea (or a putatively united Korea) can play an essential balancing role.

As the United States perceives these developments, is it not reasonable to suppose that it is trying to come to terms with this kind of confederal Northeast Asia as it constructs itself? One could analyze the military posturing of the United States in Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia not as a serious military stance but as a negotiating ploy in the geopolitical game that is being played out over the next decade.

Are China and the United States rivals? Yes, up to a point. Are they enemies? No, they are not enemies. Are they collaborators? They already are more than they admit, and will be much more so as the decade proceeds.

The result was a worldwide revolt of what the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements called “the 99%.” The revolt was against the excessive polarization of wealth, the corrupt governments, and the essentially undemocratic nature of these governments whether or not they had multiparty systems.

It is not that the OWS, the Arab Spring, or the indignados achieved everything they hoped for. It is that they managed to change world discourse, moving it away from the ideological mantras of neo-liberalism to themes like inequality, injustice, and decolonization. For the first time in a long time, ordinary people were discussing the very nature of the system in which they lived; they were no longer taking it for granted.

The question now for the world left is how it can move forward and translate this initial discursive success into political transformation. The problem can be posed quite simply. Even if, in economic terms, there exists a clear and growing cleavage between a very small group (the 1%) and a very large one (the 99%), it does not follow that this is the political division. Worldwide, right-of-center forces still command something like half of the world’s populations, or at least of those who are politically active in any way.

To transform the world therefore, the world left will need a degree of political unity it does not yet have. Indeed, there are profound disagreements about both long-range objectives and short-range tactics. It is not that these issues are not being debated. To the contrary, they are being debated heatedly, and little progress is occurring to overcome the divisions.

These divisions are not new. That doesn’t make them the easier to resolve. There are two major ones. The first has to do with elections. There are not two, but three, positions concerning elections. There is one group that is deeply suspicious of elections, arguing that participating in them is not only politically ineffectual but reinforces the legitimacy of the existing world-system.

The others think it’s crucial to take part in the electoral process. But this group is divided in two. On the one hand, there are those who claim to be pragmatic. They want to work from within – within the major left-of-center party when there is a functioning multi-party system, or within the de facto single party when parliamentary alternance is not permitted.

And of course there are those who decry this policy of choosing the so-called lesser evil. They insist that there is no significant difference between the principal alternative parties and support voting for some party that is “genuinely” on the left.

We are all familiar with this debate and we have all heard the arguments over and over. However, it is clear, at least to me, that if there isn’t some coming together of the three groups concerning electoral tactics, the world left does not have much of a chance of prevailing either in the short or the longer run.

I believe there is a mode of reconciliation. It is to make a distinction between short-term tactics and longer-term strategy. I very much agree with those who argue that obtaining state power is irrelevant to, and possibly endangers the possibility of, the longer-term transformation of the world-system. As a strategy of transformation, it has been tried many times and it has failed.

It does not follow from this that short-run electoral participation is a waste of time. The fact is that a very large part of the 99% are suffering acutely in the short-run. And it is this short-run suffering that is their principal concern. They are trying to survive, and to aid their families and friends to survive. If we think of governments not as potential agents of social transformation but as structures that can affect short-term suffering by their immediate policy decisions, then the world left is obligated to do what it can to get decisions from them that will minimize the pain.

Working to minimize the pain requires electoral participation. And what of the debate between the proponents of the lesser evil and the proponents of supporting genuinely left parties? This becomes a decision of local tactics, which vary enormously according to many factors: size of country, formal political structure, demographics of country, geopolitical location, political history. There is no standard answer, nor can there be. Nor is the answer of 2012 necessarily going to hold for 2014 or 2016. It is not, for me at least, a debate of principle but rather of an evolving tactical situation in each country.

The second basic debate that consumes the world left is that between what I call “developmentalism” and what may be called the priority of civilizational change. We can observe this debate in many parts of the world. One sees it in Latin America in the ongoing and quite angry debates between left governments and movements of indigenous peoples – for example, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela. One sees it in North America and in Europe in debates between environmentalists/Greens and the trade-unions which give priority to retaining and expanding available employment.

On the one side the “developmentalist” option, whether put forward by left governments or by trade-unions is that without such economic growth, there is no way to rectify the economic imbalances of the present-day world, whether we are talking about the polarization within countries or the polarization between countries. This group accuses their opponents of supporting, at least objectively and possibly subjectively, the interests of right-wing forces.

The proponents of the anti-developmentalist option say that the concentration on the priority of economic growth is wrong on two grounds. It is a policy that simply continues the worst features of the capitalist system. And it is a policy that causes irreparable damage – ecological and social damage.

This division is even more passionate, if that is possible, than the one about electoral participation. The only way to resolve it is by compromises, on a case-by-case basis. To make this possible, both groups need to accept the good faith left credentials of the other. It will not be easy.

Can these divisions on the left be overcome in the next five to ten years? I am not sure. But if they are not, I do not believe the world left can win the battle of the next twenty to forty years over what kind of successor system we shall have as the capitalist system collapses definitively.

Take what has been happening in November of 2011 and the first half of December. It has had confrontations with China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, Germany, and Latin America. One can’t say that it has gotten the better part of any of these controversies.

The world interpreted the presence and announcements of Pres. Obama in Australia to be an open challenge to China. He told the Australian Parliament that the United States was determined “to allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” To this end, the United States is deploying 250 Marines to an Australian air base in Darwin (and possibly raising the number in the future to 2500). 

This is only one of a number of moves of similar military display in the region. So, as the United States pulls out (or is being forced out) of the Middle East – for both political and financial reasons – it flexes its muscles in the Asia-Pacific region. Is this really believable, given both the U.S. public’s growing reluctance to be involved externally and its urgent demands to reduce expenditures, even in the military? So far, China’s “response” has been virtually a non-response, as if to say that time is on China’s side, even for its relations with the United States, or perhaps especially for its relations with the United States.

Then there’s Pakistan. The United States has thrown down the gauntlet. Pakistan must cease coddling its Islamist movements. It must cease seeking to undermine the Karzai government in Afghanistan. It must cease menacing India with threatened military action in Kashmir. Or what? That’s the problem. It seems, from leaked documents, that the United States was thinking that its last remaining friend in Pakistan, the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, might fire the Army’s leader, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. In response, Gen. Kayani arranged that Pres. Zardari go to Dubai for medical treatment. The potential U.S.-backed coup failed. And if the United States tries to retaliate by cutting off financial aid, there’s always China to take its place.

In the Middle East, what Pres. Obama wants above anything else is that nothing dramatic happen between Israel and the Palestinians until, at least, he is re-elected. This doesn’t really satisfy the needs of Saudi Arabia or of Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel. So they are both proceeding in ways that continue to stir up the pot from the United States’ point of view. And the United States has been put in the position of pleading with them, not commanding or controlling them.

Then there’s Iran, supposedly the main immediate worry of the United States (as it is of Saudi Arabia and Israel). So the United States has been using its most supersecret drones to spy on Iran. Nothing surprising in this, except that it seems that somehow one of these drones landed in Iran. I say “landed” because the key question is why and how did it land. The CIA, whose drone this is, has unconvincingly tried to suggest that some mechanical failure accounts for this. The Iranians have implied that they brought down the plan with cyberaction. The United States says “impossible” – but Debka, the internet’s voice of the Israeli hawks, says it’s true. I for one think it’s likely. In addition, now that the Iranians have the drone, they are working on deciphering all its technical secrets. Who knows? They may publish the secrets for the entire world to know. And then, how secret will the supersecret drones be?

And, oh yes, Germany. As everyone knows, there is a “crisis” in the Eurozone. And Chancellor Merkel has been working very hard to get the Eurozone countries to buy a “solution” that will work for her, both politically within Germany and economically within Europe. She has pressed for a new European treaty that would impose automatic sanctions on Eurozone countries that violate its provisions. The United States thought that this was the wrong approach. The U.S. position was that this was a middle-run action that did not address the very short-term situation. Obama dispatched his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, to Europe to insist on his alternate suggestions. No matter the details, nor who is wiser. The important thing to note is that Geithner was totally ignored and the Germans have gotten their way. 

And finally, the Latin American and Caribbean countries met in Venezuela to found a new organization, CELAC – which are Spanish initials for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Every country in the Americas signed on, except for the two that weren’t invited – the United States and Canada. CELAC is designed to replace the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the United States and Canada, and has suspended Cuba. It may take a while for the OAS to disappear and only CELAC remain. Still it’s not exactly something they are celebrating in Washington.

The first round of the movements took multiple forms across the world – the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy movements beginning in the United States and then spreading to a large number of countries, Oxi in Greece and the indignados in Spain, the student protests in Chile, and many others.

They were a fantastic success. The degree of success may be measured by an extraordinary article written by Lawrence Summers in the Financial Times on November 21, with the title, “Inequality can no longer be held at bay by the usual ideas.” This is not a theme for which Summers has previously been known.

In it he makes two remarkable points, considering that he has been personally one of the architects of the world economic policy in the last twenty years that has put us all in the dire crisis in which the world finds itself.

The first point is that there have been fundamental changes in world economic structures. Summers says that “the most important of these is the strong shift in the market reward for a small minority of citizens relative to the rewards available to most citizens.”

The second concerns the two kinds of public reactions to this reality: that of the protesters and that of the strong anti-protesters. Summers says he is against “polarization,” which is what, according to him, the protesters are engaged in doing. But then he says: “At the same time, those who are quick to label any expression of concern about rising inequality as misplaced or a product of class warfare are even further off base.”

What Summers’ article indicates is not that he has become an exponent of radical social change – far from it – but rather that he is worried about the political impact of the worldwide social justice movement, especially in what he calls the industrialized world. I call this success for the global social justice movement.

The response to this success has been a few minor concessions here and there, but then a growing amount of repression everywhere. In the United States and Canada, there has been a systematic clearing out of the “occupations.” The virtual simultaneity of these police actions seems to indicate some high-level coordination. In Egypt, the military has been resisting any dilution of their power. Austerity policies have been imposed on Greece and Italy by the fiat of Germany and France.

The story, however, is far from over. The movements are developing their second wind. The protestors have reoccupied Tahrir Square and are treating Field Marshal Tantawi to the same scorn they treated Hosni Mubarak. In Portugal, the call for a one-day general strike closed down the whole transport system. An announced strike in Great Britain protesting the cut in pensions seems likely to reduce traffic in Heathrow by 50%, which will have major worldwide repercussions, given the centrality of Heathrow to the world transport system. In Greece, the government has tried to squeeze poor pensioners by putting a big property tax on their electricity bill, threatening cut-off of electricity if it’s not paid. There is organized resistance. Local electricians are illegally reattaching the electricity, counting on the inability of the reduced municipal government staffs to enforce their law. It’s a tactic that has been successfully used in the Johannesburg suburb of Soweto for a decade now.

In the United States and Canada, the occupation movement has spread from the downtowns of cities to the campuses. And the “occupiers” are discussing alternative places to occupy during the winter months. The Chilean student rebellion has spread to the secondary schools.

Two things should be noticed about the present situation. The first is that the trade-unions – as a part of what is happening, as a result of what is happening – have become far more militant, and far more open to the idea that they should be active participants in the worldwide social justice movement. This is true in the Arab world, in Europe, in North America, in southern Africa, even in China.

The second thing to notice is the degree to which the movements everywhere have been able to maintain their emphasis on a horizontal strategy. The movements are not bureaucratic structures but coalitions of multiple groups, organizations, sectors of the population. They are still working hard to debate on an ongoing basis their tactics and their priorities, and are resisting becoming exclusionary. Does this always work smoothly? Of course not. Does this work better than reconstructing a new vertical movement, with clear leadership and collective discipline? Up to now, it has indeed worked better.

We have to think of the world struggle as a long race, in which the runners have to use their energy wisely, in order not to become exhausted while always keeping their eye on the end goal – a different kind of world-system, far more democratic, far more egalitarian than anything we have now.

Here is a list of the most important coming non-events that we have been loudly debating and analyzing: Israel is not going to bomb Iran. The euro is not going to disappear. Outside powers are not going to engage in military action inside Syria. The upsurge of worldwide popular unrest is not going to fade away.

Meanwhile, to minimal serious coverage in the media and on the internet, the Nord Stream was inaugurated in Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic Coast on Nov. 8 in the presence of Pres. Medvedev of Russia and the prime ministers of Germany, France, and the Netherlands, plus the director of Gazprom, Russia’s gas exporter, and the European Union’s Energy Commissioner. This is a geopolitical game-changer, unlike all the widely discussed non-events that are not going to happen.

What is Nord Stream? Very simply, it is a gas pipeline that has been laid in the Baltic Sea, going from Vyborg near St. Petersburg in Russia to Lubmin near the Polish border in Germany without passing through any other country. From Germany, it can proceed to France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Great Britain, and other eager buyers of Russia’s gas.

Nord Stream is an arrangement between private enterprises with the blessing of their respective governments. Russia’s Gazprom owns 51%, two German companies 31%, and 9% each for one French and one Dutch company. The proportional investments (and the potential profits) are all private.

The key element in this arrangement is that the pipeline does not pass through Poland or any Baltic state or Belorussia or Ukraine. So, all these countries not only lose whatever transit fees they could charge but cannot use their intermediary location to hold up supplies of gas to western Europe while they negotiate deals with Russia.

The German press agency, Deutsche Welle, headlined its story “Nord Stream: A commercial project with a political vision.” Le Monde headlined its story “Gazprom is established as a global energy actor.” Joseph Bauer, energy expert from Deutsche Bank Research in Frankfurt am Main, opined “It’s both a political and a commercial project, and it makes sense on both the economic and political level.”

Meanwhile the Russians have told the Chinese that they will not sell them their gas at 30% below the European prices, saying they see no need for Russia to subsidize the Chinese economy. And they have made it clear to Turkmenistan, which has enormous natural gas resources, that they will not appreciate its exporting gas other than via Russia. The Nord Stream launching comes within days of the announcement by the new president of Kyrgyzstan that he expects to close down the U.S. military air base at Manas when its lease expires in 2014. This base has been crucial in U.S. supply links to Afghanistan. Clearly, Russia is strengthening its hold on the Soviet Union’s former Central Asian republics.

Both East-Central Europe and the United States are discovering that the scheme to prevent the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is not viable. The European Union’s central mechanisms are bending before this reality, as are many of the east-central European countries. This is most difficult for Ukraine, which is torn apart by these developments. And the United States? What in fact can they do about it?

Both statements are nonsense, and merely represent self-justifying arguments for the American electorate. Obama tried his hardest, and in total conjunction with the U.S. military commanders and the Pentagon, to keep U.S. troops there after Dec. 31. He failed, not because of ineptitude, but because the Iraqi political leaders forced the U.S. troops to leave. The withdrawal marks the culmination of the U.S. defeat in Iraq, one comparable to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.

What really happened? For the last eighteen months at least, the U.S. authorities have been trying as hard as they could to negotiate an agreement with the Iraqis that would override the one signed by President George W. Bush to withdraw all troops by Dec. 31, 2011. They failed, but not for want to trying hard.

By any definition, the most pro-American groups are the Sunni groups led by Ayad Allawi, a man with notoriously close links with the CIA, and the party of Jalal Talebani, Kurdish president of Iraq. Both men in the end said, no doubt reluctantly, that it was better that U.S. troops leave.

The Iraqi leader who tried hardest to arrange for U.S. troops to remain was Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki. He obviously believed that the poor ability of the Iraqi military to maintain order would lead to new elections in which his own position would be gravely weakened, and he would probably cease to be prime minister.

The United States made concession after concession, reducing constantly the number of troops they would leave behind. The sticking point in the end was the insistence of the Pentagon on immunity for U.S. soldiers (and mercenaries) from Iraqi jurisdiction for any crimes of which they might be accused. Maliki was ready to agree to this, but no one else was. In particular, the Sadrists said they would withdraw their support for the government if Maliki agreed. And without their support, Maliki did not have the necessary majority in parliament.

Who won then? The withdrawal was a victory for Iraqi nationalism. And the person who has come to incarnate Iraqi nationalism is none other than Muqtada al-Sadr. It is true that al-Sadr leads a Shi’ite movement that has historically been violently anti-Baathist, which for his followers has usually meant being anti-Sunni Muslims. But al-Sadr has long since moved beyond this initial position to make himself and his movement the champion of U.S. withdrawal. He has reached out to Sunni leaders and to Kurdish leaders in the hope of creating a pan-Iraqi nationalist front, centered on the restoration of full Iraqi autonomy. He has won.

Of course, al-Sadr, like Maliki and many other Shi’ite politicians, has spent much of his life in exile in Iran. Is therefore al-Sadr’s victory a victory for Iran? No doubt Iran has improved its credibility inside Iraq. But it would be a major analytical error to believe that what has happened is that Iran has somehow replaced the United States in dominating the Iraqi scene.

There are fundamental strains between Iranian Shi’ites and Iraqi Shi’ites. For one thing, the Iraqis have always considered Iraq and not Iran to be the spiritual center of the Shi’ite religious world. It is true that, in the last half-century, the transformations on the geopolitical scene have allowed the ayatollahs in Iran to appear to dominate the Shi’ite religious world.

But this is akin to what happened to the relationship between the United States and western Europe after 1945. The geopolitical strength of the United States forced a shift in the cultural relationship of the two sides. Western Europeans had to accept the new cultural as well as political dominance of the United States. They went along, but western Europeans never liked it. And they are seeking now to regain their top dog cultural position. So it is with Iran/Iraq. In the last half century, the Iraqi Shi’ites had to accept Iranian cultural dominance, but they never liked it. And they will work now to regain their top dog cultural position.

Despite their public statements, both Obama and the Republicans know that the United States has been defeated. The only Americans who don’t really believe this is that small fringe of U.S. leftists who somehow cannot accept that the United States doesn’t always win out everywhere geopolitically. This small and diminishing fringe is just too invested in denouncing the United States to tolerate the reality that the United States is in serious decline.

This fringe group is arguing that nothing has changed because the United States has simply shifted its key player in Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department, which is doing two things: bringing in more Marines to provide security for the U.S. embassy; and hiring trainers for the Iraqi police forces. But bringing in more Marines is a sign of weakness, not strength. It means that even the well-guarded U.S. embassy is not safe enough from attacks. The United States has cancelled plans to open more consulates for the very same reason.

As for the trainers, it turns out that we are talking about 115 police advisors who need to be “protected” by thousands of private security guards. I would warrant that the police advisors are going to be very cautious about ever leaving the Embassy grounds and that it going to be difficult to hire enough private security guards, given that they will no longer have immunity.

No one should be surprised if, after the next Iraqi elections, the prime minister will be Muqtada al-Sadr. Neither the United States nor Iran will be overjoyed.

Why it started in the United States when it did – and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later – we’ll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the “middle class”); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population (“Wall Street”); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the “Arab spring,” the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn’t really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started.

In Stage one – the first few days – the movement was a handful of audacious, mostly young, persons who were trying to demonstrate. The press ignored them totally. Then some stupid police captains thought that a bit of brutality would end the demonstrations. They were caught on film and the film went viral on YouTube.

That brought us to Stage two – publicity. The press could no longer ignore the demonstrators entirely. So the press tried condescension. What did these foolish, ignorant youth (and a few elderly women) know about the economy? Did they have any positive program? Were they “disciplined”? The demonstrations, we were told, would soon fizzle. What the press and the powers that be didn’t count on (they never seem to learn) is that the theme of the protest resonated widely and quickly caught on. In city after city, similar “occupations” began. Unemployed 50-year-olds started to join in. So did celebrities. So did trade-unions, including none less than the president of the AFL-CIO. The press outside the United States now began to follow the events. Asked what they wanted, the demonstrators replied “justice.” This began to seem like a meaningful answer to more and more people.

This brought us to Stage three – legitimacy. Academics of a certain repute began to suggest that the attack on “Wall Street” had some justification. All of a sudden, the main voice of centrist respectability, The New York Times, ran an editorial on October 8 in which they said that the protestors did indeed have “a clear message and specific policy prescriptions” and that the movement was “more than a youth uprising.” The Times went on: “Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.” Strong language for the Times. And then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started circulating a petition asking party supporters to declare “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.”

The movement had become respectable. And with respectability came danger – Stage four. A major protest movement that has caught on usually faces two major threats. One is the organization of a significant right-wing counterdemonstration in the streets. Eric Cantor, the hardline (and quite astute) Republican congressional leader, has already called for that in effect. These counterdemonstrations can be quite ferocious. The Occupy Wall Street movement needs to be prepared for this and think through how it intends to handle or contain it.

But the second and bigger threat comes from the very success of the movement. As it attracts more support, it increases the diversity of views among the active protestors. The problem here is, as it always is, how to avoid the Scylla of being a tight cult that would lose because it is too narrowly based, and the Charybdis of no longer having a political coherence because it is too broad. There is no simple formula of how to manage avoiding going to either extreme. It is difficult.

As to the future, it could be that the movement goes from strength to strength. It might be able to do two things: force short-term restructuring of what the government will actually do to minimize the pain that people are obviously feeling acutely; and bring about long-term transformation of how large segments of the American population think about the realities of the structural crisis of capitalism and the major geopolitical transformations that are occurring because we are now living in a multipolar world.

Even if the Occupy Wall Street movement were to begin to peter out because of exhaustion or repression, it has already succeeded and will leave a lasting legacy, just as the uprisings of 1968 did. The United States will have changed, and in a positive direction. As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” A new and better world-system, a new and better United States, is a task that requires repeated effort by repeated generations. But another world is indeed possible (albeit not inevitable). And we can make a difference. Occupy Wall Street is making a difference, a big difference.

To understand this, we have to consider what they thought the 9/11 attacks were supposed to accomplish. At the time, Osama bin Laden set out clearly what his long-term objectives were. He said he wished to efface eighty years of humiliation for the Islamic world. Eighty years? Bin Laden was referring to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 (not quite 80 years) by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Bin Laden’s avowed objective was the recreation of a caliphate over the entire Muslim world, presumably by a direct descendant of Muhamed and governed by shar’ia.

What stood in the way of this objective? Three main obstacles. The first was the United States, which used its power to subjugate the Islamic world. The second and third were the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which bin Laden considered the two pillars of support of the United States within the Islamic world, and whose governments he denounced as “un-Islamic.”

And how would the 9/11 attack further this objective? Let us follow his reasoning. The direct and spectacular attack on the United States, on its home soil, was intended to expose the fact that the United States was a “paper tiger” and to install deep fears among Americans about their physical safety and their collective future. Only this past week, al-Qaeda publicly criticized Pres. Ahmadinejad of Iran for suggesting that 9/11 was the work of the Americans, and not of al-Qaeda.

The Americans, bin Laden hoped, would be drawn into an endless “war” – one that they could not win, even if they did not “lose” it in any short-term military sense. Bin Laden expected that the continuing strain of the endless war would eventually exhaust the United States, by costing it dearly, both materially and geopolitically. If this was bin Laden’s intent, it is hard to argue in 2011 that the last ten years have shown that he was mistaken.

But why then also try to bring down the Saudi and Pakistani governments? And how? Bin Laden’s analysis was that both governments – which he considered corrupt as well as un-Islamic – were able to survive, indeed flourish, by virtue of the ambiguity of their discourse. Both governments sought to retain the support both of Westernizing, materialist elites and of strongly Islamic popular forces by talking two languages – one to the Western world, and another internally.

Bin Laden’s strategy was clearly to expose their duplicity by forcing them to choose between the two rhetorics. To do this, he counted on United States pressure – as a result of 9/11 – to help him do what he wanted. That is, the United States would become his agent in forcing the Saudi and Pakistani regimes to end their ambiguity.

By 2011, it seems clear that this is exactly what is happening in Pakistan. As the military situation becomes more and more difficult for the United States in Afghanistan, the United States has become more and more impatient with the fact that the Pakistani regime – or at least that powerful part of it that is the intelligence agency, the ISI – is clearly sustaining various groups that are actively combating the United States in Afghanistan: the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and even al-Qaeda itself.

The U.S. Congress has become very restive, and wishes to cut off aid to Pakistan. The new U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon E. Panetta, is pushing for direct U.S. military action inside Pakistan. And even Adm. Michael Mullen, outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been insisting heretofore on great prudence vis-à-vis the Pakistanis (reflecting a widespread reluctance within the U.S. armed forces to engage militarily in yet another geographical arena) seems to have finally lost his patience and has now openly criticized the Pakistani government.

The Pakistani response? The Minister of the Interior, Rehman Malik, has in turn openly criticized U.S. unilateral attacks on Islamist militants in Pakistan. He demanded that the United States “respect our sovereignty.” The Pakistanis have called on their other close allies to sustain them. They obtained an open endorsement of the defense of their “sovereignty” by the Chinese Vice-Premier. And the head of the ISI flew off to Saudi Arabia to firm up the Pakistani-Saudi joint resistance to U.S. pressure.

Al-Qaeda can take great satisfaction in the fact that it was the successful killing of their leader by U.S. Navy Seals that precipitated this open confrontation of U.S. and Pakistani leaders, because it exposed to public view the division within the Pakistani government between those who had been collusive in hiding bin Laden (and were therefore not informed by the United States of the impending raid) and those who had colluded with the U.S. government by pinpointing the location of bin Laden. In the wake of the U.S. action, Pakistani public opinion has been almost unanimous in condemning the U.S. attack.

Today, the U.S.-Pakistani alliance is, everyone agrees, extremely fragile. Al-Qaeda is no doubt congratulating itself. Has al-Qaeda done as well in undermining the Saudi regime? Not quite as well. The Saudi government has managed to continue the ambiguity up to a point, but only by taking greater distance from the United States in its multiple actions within the Arab world. The Saudi regime has clearly been worried that they might replicate the kind of breakdown in relations that is occurring in Pakistan.

The way the Saudis have been handling this has been a combination of great internal firmness within the country, some additional concessions to the elite elements (witness the new announcement of allowing women to vote), direct intervention when necessary to sustain the governments of the neighboring Gulf states (witness the military troops sent to aid the Bahrain government), and increased economic and diplomatic aid to the Palestinians. But will all this be enough? The biggest single problem for the regime is the oppressed, contentious Shi’ite minority, who are fortuitously located just where the largest oil deposits sit. In addition, Al-Qaeda is not going to help the Saudi regime deal intelligently with the Shi’ite complaints.

So, how shall we sum this up? True, al-Qaeda leaders have been repeatedly killed by U.S. Special Forces. Indeed, they have lost bin Laden himself.  But this doesn’t seem to have slowed them down. Al-Qaeda has become an Islamic franchise, and there seem to be new groups all the time who wish to assume the name, even if they act in practice autonomously. The United States is clearly weaker geopolitically today than in 2001. The Pakistani regime is fighting for its life. And the Saudis are very worried.

No caliphate yet, but the al-Qaeda leaders are impatiently patient. Operationally, they are impatient. Strategically, they are very patient.

The Social-Democrats were most powerful in western Europe, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (where they were called New Deal Democrats) – in short, in the wealthy countries of the world-system, those that constituted what might be called the pan-European world. They were so successful that their right-of-center opponents also endorsed the concept of the welfare state, trying merely to reduce its costs and extent. In the rest of the world, the states tried to jump onto this bandwagon by projects of national “development.”

Social-democracy was a highly successful program during this period. It was sustained by two realities of the times: the incredible expansion of the world-economy, which created the resources that made the redistribution possible; and United States hegemony in the world-system, which ensured the relative stability of the world-system, and especially the absence of serious violence within this wealthy zone.

This rosy picture did not last. The two realities came to an end. The world-economy stopped expanding and entered into a long stagnation, in which we are still living; and the United States began its long, if slow, decline as a hegemonic power. Both new realities have accelerated considerably in the twenty-first century.

The new era beginning in the 1970s saw the end of the world centrist consensus on the virtues of the welfare state and state-managed “development.” It was replaced by a new, more rightwing ideology, called variously neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus, which preached the merits of reliance on markets rather than on governments. This program was said to be based on a supposedly new reality of “globalization” to which “there was no alternative.”

Implementing neo-liberal programs seemed to maintain rising levels of “growth” on stock markets but at the same time led to rising worldwide levels of indebtedness, unemployment, and lower real income levels for the vast majority of the world’s populations. Nonetheless, the parties that had been the mainstays of the left-of-center social-democratic programs moved steadily to the right, eschewing or playing down support for the welfare state and accepting that the role of reformist governments had to be reduced considerably.

While the negative effects on the majority of the populations were felt even within the wealthy pan-European world, they were felt even more acutely in the rest of the world. What were their governments to do? They began to take advantage of the relative economic and geopolitical decline of the United States (and more widely of the pan-European world) by focusing on their own national “development.” They used the power of their state apparatuses and their overall lower costs of production to become “emerging” nations. The more “left” their verbiage and even their political commitment, the more they were determined to “develop.”

Will this work for them as it had once worked for the pan-European world in the post-1945 period? It is far from obvious that it can, despite the remarkable “growth” rates of some of these countries – particularly, the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) – in the last five to ten years. For there are some serious differences between the current state of the world-system and that of the immediate post-1945 period.

One, the real cost levels of production, despite neoliberal efforts to reduce them, are in fact now considerably higher than they were in the post-1945 period, and threaten the real possibilities of capital accumulation. This makes capitalism as a system less attractive to capitalists, the most perceptive of whom are searching for alternative ways to secure their privileges.

Two, the ability of the emerging nations to increase in the short run their acquisition of wealth has put a great strain on the availability of resources to provide their needs. It therefore has created an ever-growing race for land acquisition, water, food, and energy resources, which is not only leading to fierce struggles but is in turn also reducing the worldwide ability of capitalists to accumulate capital.

Three, the enormous expansion of capitalist production has created at last a serious strain on the world’s ecology, such that the world has entered into a climate crisis, whose consequences threaten the quality of life throughout the world. It has also fostered a movement for reconsidering fundamentally the virtues of “growth” and “development” as economic objectives. This growing demand for a different “civilizational” perspective is what is being called in Latin America the movement for “buen vivir” (a liveable world).

Four, the demands of subordinate groups for a real degree of participation in the decision-making processes of the world has come to be directed not only at “capitalists” but also at the “left” governments that are promoting national “development.”

Fifth, the combination of all these factors, plus the visible decline of the erstwhile hegemonic power, has created a climate of constant and radical fluctuations in both the world-economy and the geopolitical situation, which has had the result of paralyzing both the world’s entrepreneurs and the world’s governments. The degree of uncertainty – not only long-term but also the very short-term – has escalated markedly, and with it the real level of violence.

The social-democratic solution has become an illusion. The question is what will replace it for the vast majority of the world’s populations.