4/23/08 Arrighi 2005

Does dollar sovereignty underwrite US military strength, making possible funding for the deficits incurred by the military? Or does military strength secure the dollar's continued function as reserve currency?
US leadership after WWII, required resurrecting the destroyed capitalist centers of Europe. this could only be politically made palatable by inflating the Soviet threat. 'to scare hell out of the american people', according to Truman. this spread the policies of Keynsian-new dealism to europe. the war on terror, on the other hand, only serves in the current conjucture to further undermine the dollar's position as reserve currency, without stimulating production. in a world of excess liquidity.
the power logics of territory and capital accumulation. never-ending accumulatin requires a power which can extend geographically with the reach of capitalist expansion.
David Harvey on capitalist production of space:
"The aggregate effect is . . . that capitalism perpetually seeks to create a geographical landscape to facilitate its activities at one point in time only to have to destroy it and build a wholly different landscape at a later point in time to accommodate its perpetual thirst for endless capital accumulation. Thus is the history of creative destruction written into the landscape of the actual historical geography of capital accumulation"