与许多出生于20世纪80年代的英国人一样，记者兼《卫报》专栏作家欧文·琼斯在托尼·布莱尔的陈词滥调中长大成人。千禧年之交的政治，是一则将暂时的权宜之计误认为永恒真理的故事：自由市场意识形态的最终胜利；美国的军事霸权；基于规则的国际秩序。正如琼斯在其新书中所回顾的，在接下来的二十五年里，伴随着一系列经济失败、外交政策灾难和政治危机，这些确定性轰然崩塌。
ike many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair’s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium was a story of temporary dispensations mistaken for eternal truths: the definitive triumph of free market ideology; US military supremacy; a rules-based global order. As Jones recounts in his new book, these certainties would come crashing down over the next quarter of a century amid a succession of economic failures, foreign policy disasters and political crises.
事实上，“西方”本身——作为美国加上较富裕的西欧国家的简称——在华盛顿政府日益增长的单边主义面前，如今显得颇为过时。但在2000年代，它是常用词汇，仿佛这个半球本身就是一个独立的行为体。回顾美国主导的阿富汗和伊拉克战争，我们不仅被提醒其惨重的死亡人数（保守估计总计达五十万人），更被提醒其彻底的战略失败；琼斯写道，2021年喀布尔机场的撤离行动，是“迄今为止向世界播出的美国衰落最鲜明的画面之一”。
Indeed, “the west” itself – as a shorthand for the US plus the wealthier western European nations – feels almost quaint today, given the increasing unilateralism of the administration in Washington. But in the 2000s it was part of the lexicon, as if the hemisphere were a political actor in its own right. Revisiting the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are reminded not just of their horrific death tolls (totalling half a million, by conservative estimates) but also their total strategic failure; the 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport, Jones writes, was “among the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world”.
除了 destabilize 该地区，这些干预行动还削弱了国际法律体系的基础。正如琼斯所指出的，1999年北约在未经联合国安理会授权的情况下轰炸南斯拉夫，开创了一个先例；2003年同样未经授权的伊拉克入侵，进一步削弱了联合国的权威。因此，当弗拉基米尔·普京随后以他自己可疑的借口入侵乌克兰时，西方的反对声音可以被斥为虚伪。
In addition to destabilising the region, these interventions weakened the foundations of the international legal system. As Jones points out, a precedent was set when Nato bombed Yugoslavia without UN security council authorisation in 1999; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, also without authorisation, further undermined the UN. So when Vladimir Putin subsequently invaded Ukraine on his own dubious pretext, western objections could be dismissed as hypocrisy.
西方对国际法治漠不关心最可耻的例子之一，或许是基尔·斯塔默软弱无力地宣称，以色列有权切断加沙200万平民的供水和供电——这是一项战争罪——以报复哈马斯在2023年10月7日的袭击。
Perhaps the most ignominious example of western indifference to the international rule of law was Keir Starmer’s limp assertion that Israel had the “right” to cut off water and electricity to 2 million civilians in Gaza – a war crime – in retaliation for Hamas’s attacks on 7 October 2023.
与这些地缘政治灾难相伴的，是琼斯对国内衰落的讲述：西方经济建立在长期的不安全感和不稳定的就业之上。2000年代，新工党推行撒切尔主义政策，掠夺公众财富：“基本服务[被]改造成了旨在创造回报的资产。乘客为拥挤的列车支付更高的票价。河流和海洋遭到污染，而水务公司则债务缠身，大肆派发股息。”随后，2008年金融危机和银行纾困计划接踵而来，其代价由紧缩政策承担。
Alongside these geopolitical catastrophes, Jones tells a story of domestic decline, of western economies built on chronic insecurity and precarious employment. In the 2000s, Thatcherite policies pursued by New Labour fleeced the public: “Essential services [were] turned into assets designed to generate returns. Passengers paid more for overcrowded trains. Rivers and seas were fouled while water companies loaded themselves with debt and paid out dividends.”Then came the 2008 financial crisis and the bankers’ bailout, paid for by austerity.
在英国及其他地方，琼斯指出，“中间派政府无法以任何有意义的方式应对经济衰退，与极右翼的崛起之间存在某种相关性”。
In Britain and elsewhere, Jones notes a “correlation between the inability of centrist governments to tackle economic decline in any meaningful way, and the rise of the far right”.
书中穿插了对各类亲历者、记者、学者和活动人士的访谈片段，其中包括巴格达伊拉克国家博物馆馆长、莱曼兄弟公司前员工、阿富汗红新月会前负责人、希腊经济学家亚尼斯·瓦鲁福akis，以及保守派评论员安德鲁·沙利文——他曾是伊拉克战争的支持者，如今却深感悔恨，并承认：“无论在主要问题上，还是在这场战争的道德性、可行性和理由上，我都错了。”
The book is interspersed with snippets of interviews with an assortment of eyewitnesses, journalists, scholars and activists. They include the director of Iraq national museum in Baghdad, a former Lehman Brothers employee, a former head of the Afghan Red Crescent, the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, and the conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, a repentant cheerleader for the Iraq war, who admits: “I was wrong on the major issues, on the morality of it and the practicality of it and the reason for it.”
其中涉及的大部分领域——布什和布莱尔的战争、金融崩盘、民粹主义浪潮——都已被 extensively 广泛报道。普通而知情的读者不会从中获得新的认识，但看到昔日新闻周期中的事件如今被纳入历史长河，仍令人警醒；琼斯对自由市场原教旨主义的关注，也构成了一条引人入胜的贯穿主线。他指出，第二次特朗普政府尽管充满愤世嫉俗的虚伪与卑劣，却是这种哲学“逻辑上的终点”。
Much of this terrain – Bush and Blair’s wars, the financial crash, the populist surge – has been extensively covered. The average well-informed reader will learn nothing new, but it is bracing to see what was once the news cycle take its place in the sweep of history, and Jones’s focus on free-market fundamentalism provides a compelling through-line. He suggests the second Trump administration, in all its cynical venality, is “the logical endpoint” of that philosophy.
他还提醒我们，20世纪90年代对俄罗斯经济的激进私有化造成了严重的经济困境，最终助长了普京的民族复仇主义。
And he reminds us that the aggressive privatisation of the Russian economy in the 1990s brought terrible economic hardship which ultimately fuelled Putin’s revanchist nationalism.
数十年来，选民一直被兜售一种狂热的意识形态：私营部门的特权必须凌驾于公共利益之上，任何 lesser 的主张都无异于斯大林主义。这一思想至今仍被视为正统，但纽约市长佐赫兰·马姆达尼公开认同社会主义，并逐渐崭露头角，这为那些像琼斯一样希望社会建立在“共同保障、民主权力、相互义务，以及承认我们命运休戚与共”之上的人，带来了一线希望。
For decades, electorates have been mis-sold a fanatical ideology: the prerogatives of the private sector must override the collective interest, and anything less is tantamount to Stalinism. This remains orthodoxy, but the rise to prominence of Zohran Mamdani, the avowedly socialist mayor of New York, offers a glimmer of hope to those who, like Jones, would prefer a society built on “common provision, democratic power, mutual obligation and the recognition that our fates are bound together”.