Dismantling the Empire - 9780805093032

"Johnson wants the scales to fall from American eyes so that the nation can see the truth about its role in the world. His is a patriot's passion: his motive is to save the American republic he loves."---Jonathan Freedland, The New York Review of Books

"The role of the prophet is an honorable one. In Chalmers Johnson the American empire has found its Jeremiah. He deserves to be heard."---Andrew J. Bacevich, The Washington Post Book World

"Chalmers Johnson's important new book is something with which everyone who aspires to a worthwhile opinion about this country's future must contend."---Los Angeles Times (On Nemesis)

"Trenchantly argued, comprehensively documented, grimly eloquent Worthy of the republic it seeks to defend."---The Boston Globe (On the Sorrows of Empire)

"Stunning and shocking...Blowback is a wake-up call for America."---John Dower, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of Embracing Defeat

In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays, Johnson measures that price, assesses the dangers America faces, and shows just how the United States became a superpower living desperately beyond its means. 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 devastatingly 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.