This volume collects 11 essays on geopolitics after the Cold War written by the late Gowan (formerly a professor of international relations at London Metropolitan U., UK) and originally appearing in the pages of the New Left Review--where Gowan was a member of the editorial collective--between 1998 and 2009. The essays provide a critical leftist perspective on a number of key issues influencing the nature and evolution of the world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These issues include the implications of replacing narrow state sovereignty with neoliberal internationalism under US hegemony, the hidden agenda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's attack on Yugoslavia in the name of protecting human rights, US manipulations of the United Nations, the US as simultaneous beneficiary and undermining agent of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the conceptual and rhetorical underpinnings of the ideology of Atlantic liberal interventionism, an ideological forebear of neoliberal globalization in the personage of Woodrow Wilson's chief territorial geographer at the end of World War I, US post-Cold War grand strategy and its connections to both domestic policy and earlier Western imperialism, critiques of Andrew Basevich's American Empire and Christopher Layne's Peace of Illusions, and analysis of the 2008 economic meltdown. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)