Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

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Henry Holt and Company, Aug 17, 2010 - Political Science - 224 pages

The author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy reflects on America's waning power in a masterful collection of essays

In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces. Our reliance on Pentagon economics, a global empire of bases, and war without end is, he declares, nothing short of "a suicide option."

Dismantling the Empire explores the subjects for which Johnson is now famous, from the origins of blowback to Barack Obama's Afghanistan conundrum, including our inept spies, our bad behavior in other countries, our ill-fought wars, and our capitulation to a military that has taken ever more control of the federal budget. There is, he proposes, only one way out: President Obama must begin to dismantle the empire before the Pentagon dismantles the American Dream. If we do not learn from the fates of past empires, he suggests, our decline and fall are foreordained. This is Johnson at his best: delivering both a warning and an urgent prescription for a remedy.

From inside the book

 

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America's Last Best Hope Chalmers Johnson. treaties, including the one banning ... government, the American people unexpectedly demonstrated that they got the ... us who had long watched this area noted Obama's silence and were alarmed for ...
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America's Last Best Hope Chalmers Johnson. The essays in this volume were, for the ... us as a nation, we are choosing what I call the suicide option. It also ... government that took office in Japan in 2009. Instead, we continue to try to ...
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America's Last Best Hope Chalmers Johnson. McChrystal, who had previously run ... United States cannot afford them. The federal deficit was already spiraling out ... government, President Obama chose to continue our imperialist project. As ...
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America's Last Best Hope Chalmers Johnson. 1. BLOWBACK. WORLD. November 5, 2004 Steve Coll ends ... government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the ...
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America's Last Best Hope Chalmers Johnson. their successors in the Reagan and ... government in 1953, carried out in the interests of British Petroleum. In ... government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply ...

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Selected pages

Contents

The Suicide Option
1
WHAT WE DID
9
SPIES ROGUES AND MERCENARIES
65
BASEWORLD
107
HOW TO END IT
181
Note on Sources
197
Acknowledgments
198
Index
199
About The Author
213
The American Empire Project
214
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
Chalmers Johnson
No preview available - 2010
Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
Chalmers Johnson
No preview available - 2011

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2010)

Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is the author of the bestselling books Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, which make up his Blowback Trilogy. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and TomDispatch.com.

Bibliographic information

TitleDismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
American Empire Project
AuthorChalmers Johnson
PublisherHenry Holt and Company, 2010
ISBN1429964049, 9781429964043
Length224 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / United States / 21st Century
Political Science / International Relations / General
  
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