In this landmark work, ten influential writers, including Tariq Ali, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Aziz Al-Azmeh, question the intellectual justifications that underpin the ‘New Imperialism’ of the United States. Exposing the broader motivations behind the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, they dismiss as self-delusional the official rhetoric of democracy, human rights and liberty. Incisive and passionately argued, the authors assert that these new and inconsistent ideologies of empire can only be policed on a global scale through the use of military might, raising the spectre of perpetual war. With potentially ruinous consequences for the very freedom and democracy that the New Imperialists claim as their own, this book is a chilling warning against intellectual complicity, and a vital tool for understanding global politics today.