An activist intellectual like Noam Chomsky, Ignacio Ramonet is an internationally recognized and respected journalist and editor of the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique (published monthly with the Guardian newspaper from Britain). For the first time, this articulate and radical voice is presented to English language readers discussing the fundamental global issues at stake in the recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere.

This book provides a vital and up-to-the-minute European view of the current U.S. war drive and warns of the dangers inherent in neoliberal globalization, which he describes as planetary social war: We can't be satisfied with a planet where some inhabitants live in prosperity while millions of others live in the most appalling misery. The solution, he says, is for civil society to reclaim its place as the key protagonist on the international political stage.

Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, a French monthly published in several languages and with an international circulation of 1 million. He is founder and president of French ATTAC, a key organization in the antiglobalization movement. A professor of media studies at the University of Paris VII, Ramonet is the author of several books about the media and geopolitics. He has recently interviewed Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

A characteristically wise and thoughtful review of the state of the world, coupled with an incisive analysis of its likely fate if the prevailing tendencies so skillfully explored here are not sharply reversed.--Noam Chomsky

Ramonet offers us an intellectual antidote to selfishness, passivity and despair as we seek ways to resist the current planetary social war.--Ariel Dorfman