Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

Chalmers Johnson

Language: English

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Published: Mar 29, 2011

Description:

Review

"Stimulating and prescient. . ."

—_Times Literary Supplement_

"Succinct, hard-hitting attacks on what the author perceives as America's ruinous imperial follies..."

—_Publishers Weekly_, starred review

"Concise, clear, hard-hitting. . . Dismantling the Empire is a must read for anyone looking for meaningful information concerning the future of the American Empire."

—_Foreign Policy Journal_

Praise for Chalmers Johnson

“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.”
—_The 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

Product Description

From the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy, an urgent call to confront America's waning power

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, bad behavior in other countries, ill-fought wars, and 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 America's empire of bases 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 a crucial prescription for a remedy.