Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope »

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, The Nation, and TomDispatch.com. He lives near San Diego, California.

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.

Publishers Weekly

This timely book from accomplished historian Johnson (Blowback) collects previously published articles that make succinct, hard-hitting attacks on what the author perceives as America's ruinous imperial follies. Johnson is especially critical of the U.S. penchant for covert operations run by the CIA--"the president's private army"--and its enthrallment to what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. For Johnson, the country's devotion to the "military Keynesianism" ascendant since WWII has not only caused untold and unnecessary damage at home and abroad but is "a form of slow economic suicide." His proposal to abolish the CIA and sell off the more than 700 military bases around the world may sound fanciful, but, Johnson insists, "Change is in the air." Indeed, he's no voice in the wilderness: recent movements across the Congressional aisle to drastically curb Pentagon spending suggest a new and serious attempt to address the problem so compellingly presented here. (Aug.)

Introduction: The Suicide Option 1

Part I: What We Did

1. Blowback World 11

2. Empire v. Democracy 29

3. The Smash of Civilizations 40

4. Peddling Democracy 52

Part II: Spies, Rogues, and Mercenaries

5. Agency of Rogues 67

6. An Imperialist Comedy 84

7. Warning: Mercenaries at Work 93

Part III: Baseworld

8. America's Empire of Bases 109

9. America's Unwelcome Advances 120

10. Baseless Expenditures 129

Part IV: The Pentagon Takes Us Down

11. Going Bankrupt 135

12. The Military-Industrial Man 148

13. We Have the Money (If Only We Didn't Waste It on the Defense Budget) 158

14. Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon 163

Part V: How to End It

15. Dismantling the Empire 183

Note on Sources 197

Acknowledgments 198

Index 199