Bush's vision of a free world actually looks just like the corporate globalization agenda pushed by a succession of American presidents in institutions like the World Trade Organization.
But this administration yearns for freedom too much to leave it up to trade negotiators. Unlike his predecessors, Bush isn't content to use carrots and sticks and a liberal dose of arm twisting to advance that agenda. His administration has made the neoliberal policies euphemistically referred to as "free-trade" a centerpiece of its national security policy.
Bush is willing to use the awesome force of the United States military to guarantee the freedom of the world's largest multinationals.
In her new book, The Bush Agenda, Antonia Juhasz peels the veils away from Bush's agenda - imperialism, militarism and corporate globalization - and exposes who drives it: a group of hawkish ideologues with an unprecedented relationship to major defense and energy companies.
Juhasz shows that the invasion of Iraq - an invasion that was as much economic as military - was the centerpiece of a larger project: the creation a New American Century in which the end-goal of American foreign policy is to enrich the corporate elites, and dissent at home will not be tolerated. Juhasz is a wonk - she got her start as a staffer for Rep. John Conyers - but the book is as readable as it is deeply researched.
I caught up with Juhasz last week at Washington's Union Station, just blocks away from the White House, to chat about The Bush Agenda.
Joshua Holland: <19th century Prussian military philosopher Carl von> Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics by other means. You suggest that for the Bush administration, war is an extension of corporate globalization by other means. Run down your basic premise.
Antonia Juhasz: The Bush administration has implemented a particularly radical model of corporate globalization by which it has teamed overt military might - full-scale invasion - with the advancement of its corporate globalization agenda. And this model is particularly imperial - that's one of the things that makes it different from, for example, the Reagan or Bush Sr. regimes. As opposed to simply replacing the head of a regime that is no longer serving the interests of the administration, the Bush team has gone further - using a military invasion to fundamentally transform a country's political and economic structure.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050506D.shtml