Alfred McCoy - Who Governs the Globe? 

I was lucky enough to have Al McCoy as a university history teacher for a while when he taught in Sydney. For me a high point of this marvellously distilled conversation (with good questions asked) was when McCoy refers to the apex of US imperial power "during the 40 years of the cold war". As he suggests, during that period it had many sides of Eurasia within its military control. It had Europe with NATO on one side of Eurasia. It had East and South East Asia on another axis (presence in Japan, Philipines, South Korea, Australia etc with alliances such as ANZUS, SEATO, ASEAN). It then took over the British base in the Bahrain taking power in the underbelly of Eurasia in the Persian Gulf. McCoy goes on to note this history is the background to the 700 plus military bases the US has across the planet - "1,000 jet fighters all ringing around that Eurasian landmass blocking up those two great landed powers, China and Russia, during the Cold War, and dominating that land mass, and that has been the underpinning of US global power. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, we dominated Eurasia and that was the epicentre of our global power."

Thank you very much for the conversatioin with professor Alfred McCoy. I always a fan of his work!

UK anti slavery efforts weren't completely altruistic. Managing slavery's wildly complicated kudzu like growth became too much. In addition a new form of slavery was coming online. Coal etc replaced slaves, amplified exponentially the work formerly done by slaves. In an incredible jiujitsu move we're all now slaves bonded to fossil fuels. Thanks for great vid!

Can’t believe this guy is nearly 80. What an intelligent articulate man.

Excellent and extraordinary interview, thank you so much! Aside from the civil society "principle" versus empire "power" duality (or, perhaps, dialectical?) historiographical framework Alfred McCoy advances, to contextualize geopolitics past and present, l listened especially acutely to the last half hour, concerning energy usage and our present ecocide and climate collapse. (I am a philosopher, not a historian, and my specialties include the hard empirical sciences like physics and atmospheric science). I wholeheartedly agree with A.M. that China is wielding the shovel, in digging our grave (we don't need to engage in MAD, via nukes, we're doing it already, via irreversible runaway global warming, climate collapse, and all its symptoms including ecosystem collapses, extinctions, including our own.) Frankly, l believe A.M. put it best when he said that historians can accurately retrospectively interpret past patterns, but are laughable when it comes to predictions (interpolation is not extrapolation.) Overall, l commend his "solutionist" optimism about our present climate collapse predicament, though he betrays (like most who advocate this view) his own form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, by his very admission, he acknowledges that "there's no planet B," i.e. the climate apocalypse we're creating is unraveling any prospects of a future world order, and on the other hand, he speculates that we can go on business as usual with some techno and policy bandaid modifications: more nuke facilities (lean and mean) and restructure the UN Security Council, that sort of thing. These are red herrings, predicated on "hopium." To explore or present predicament from a deeper perspective involving history energy use and ecology I invite everyone to read William Catton's classic Overshoot (1980) and also to focus on organizations like Michael Dowd's PostDoom. The sooner we truly understand the predicament (from a deep structural way) the better we'll be able to adapt to the present and inconceivably future horrors (barring some one-off miraculous event like we suddenly awaken to a post scarcity economy because fusion-not fission- power has become economically viable and penetrates the energy infrastructure on a global scale. But this is pure science fantasy.)

Ask who you can not criticize. It's them who rule the world.

Brilliant video Clear concise logical cognitive 😊🏴‍☠️

Wow! Such breadth of knowledge and integration of multiple prospective. Thank you.

I will be delighted to see the end of Washington's empire.

I trust in humans, humanity. Chinese citizens doubly so. They've had a taste of a better life. Western foods and habits causing huge growing healthcare problems. Their now 25+ year infrastructure is beginning to time out here in US we know what comes next. On environment regardless of climate outcomes is burning through one hundred billion barrels of oil equivalent energy per year. Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, the height of Pittsburgh's power! Endless coal shafts in and around the city. Just north of Pittsburgh is Drakes Well, first commercial oil well. Oil was so easy to get at a wooden bit did the digging. Today all the coal and oil are gone. There's no Oil Fairy refilling the holes. After all it's fossil fuels made over billions of years being used millions of times faster than they were made.

Naïve Guy: "We're such a hyper connected world now that war is impossible." Putin: "Hold my vodka."

McCoy certainly shared a number of profound insights but the entire discussion avoided the topic of global economic organization and its political forms. The problems we confront are systemic. While it's not as though you can't have an opinion on a direction to be taken within the context of the current moribund system, i.e. capitalist relations of production. Peace is preferable to war. Access to education and healthcare is preferable to the opposite. However, short of simultaneously embracing a socialist political perspective humanity's prospects keep winnowing down to... too little, too late. That was missing. Does McCoy think that the problems inherently identified with capitalist organization can be solved within and by capitalism? That has proven itself to be a continuously doomed project. And don't identify the cruel outcomes in the Soviet Union and China with socialism. Those distortions are a consequence of the isolation of the revolution to backward countries with leadership structures that succumbed to the pressures of isolation, i.e. Stalinism. There are no national solutions.

"DEMOCRITIZATION OF ENERGY " is Prof. McCoy's sliver of hope for the future of humanity. Thank you so much. A truly great man.

Mr McCoy one of the underrated historians/ analysts since he’s not a mouthpiece for Empire’s services in charge of propaganda.

Great conversation!

I should perhaps begin learning Mandarin ASAP.

❤❤

That man of sin who's throne is in Rome.

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