Sklar, Holly. Reagan, Trilateralism and the Neoliberals: Containment
and Intervention in the 1980s. Boston: South End Press, 1986. 77 pages.
Holly Sklar edited a 1980 volume of essays on Trilateralism, and has
also written extensively on the war in Nicaragua. This pamphlet explores
the U.S. foreign policy spectrum of the 1980s, from "rollbackers" fighting
the Soviet evil empire, to the "neointerventionists" with their "liberal"
ideas about limited containment. This "politically relevant spectrum"
shifted dramatically with the transition from President Carter to the Reagan
Doctrine. Sklar views this shift as a failure of Carter's ambitions of
"trilateral accommodationist consensus" under a Pax Americana. The best
example of this failure is the war between left and right in Nicaragua.
But Sklar is dated. The U.S. right objected more loudly than the left
to our 1991 intervention in the Gulf, and by 1994 Bill Clinton and his elite
masters expect the UN to police the world, while Russia begs for crumbs from
Wall Street. It wasn't the "trilateral consensus" that failed, but rather
the consensus that left vs. right means anything these days, or that Sklar's
"self-determination for the Third World" means much in the context of
international finance and expanded free trade. It's time for Sklar to dust
off her 1980 notebooks and take a fresh look at those elite globalists.
ISBN 0-89608-213-X
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