Dismantling the Empire America's Last Best Hope [Paperback]

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

In his prophetic bookBlowback, 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 Empireexplores 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.

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 Empireis a must read for anyone looking for meaningful information concerning the future of the American Empire. Foreign Policy Journal

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 honorablelÓ0