For those who believed that the precise and overwhelming demonstration of US military power in Afghanistan and Iran would “shock and awe” the rest of the world — and particularly Washington’s foes and aspiring rivals — into accepting its hegemony, 2006 was not a good year.

Not only has Washington become ever more bogged down — at the current rate of nearly three billion dollars and 20 soldiers’ lives a week — in an increasingly fragmented and violent Iraq whose de facto civil war threatens to draw in its neighbours, but a resurgent Taliban has exposed the fragility of what gains have been made in Afghanistan since the US-led military campaign ousted the group five years ago.

In Lebanon, a pro-western government, the product of last year’s US-backed “Cedar Revolution”, finds itself under siege from a Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah which appears to have emerged from last summer’s war with Israel stronger and more confident than ever. Meanwhile, North Korea ended its longstanding moratorium on testing its ballistic missiles on the Fourth of July, thus making its own rather defiant contribution to the fireworks traditionally associated with Washington’s Independence Day celebrations. Apparently dissatisfied with Washington’s appreciation, Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test four months later.

Similarly, Iran, the other surviving member of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”, announced last April that it successfully enriched uranium and subsequently shrugged off US and European demands that it freeze its programme. An increasingly assertive and energy-rich Russia has also become noticeably more defiant over the past year, challenging with growing success Washington’s post-9/11 military encroachment in the Caucasus and Central Asia and effectively reversing two of the three US-backed “colour revolutions” — in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan — in its near abroad. The looming succession battle in Turkmenistan will likely intensify this latest version of “Great Game”. By collaborating with China in both the UN Security Council and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Moscow has also challenged the unipolarists’ notion that Washington’s overwhelming global military dominance would not provoke the creation of countervailing coalitions. Of course, the most important revolt against the Bush administration’s Washington’s globocop aspirations took place here at home last month when voters handed Democrats control of both houses of Congress in mid-term elections in which Iraq and foreign policy, by virtually all accounts, played the decisive role.

Polls in both the run-up to the election and immediately afterward found that a large majority of citizens believe the administration’s unilateralism had made the US less safe. Nearly eight in 10 respondents in one survey sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations and designed by legendary pollster Daniel Yankelovich said they thought the world saw the US as “arrogant”, and nearly 90 per cent said such negative perceptions threaten national security. The post-election departure of two arch-unilateralists, former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and UN Ambassador John Bolton, notwithstanding, nothing fires up the imperial impulse more than multiplying acts of defiance. — IPS