blowback the costs and consequences of american empire

He agrees that 'America's values and institutions are vastly more humane than those of Stalin's Russia.' But this does not alter the fact that the two countries experienced similar paths of military and economic development-and, as a result, reached similar international positions. He acknowledges that few Americans are ready to recognize the parallel, because it implies moral equivalency.

empire most resembles that of the Soviet Union. that disguises the actual relationships among its members.'Īccording to Johnson, the U.S. 'The more modern empires I have in mind,' he writes, 'normally lie concealed beneath some ideological or juridical concept. That the United States has, in fact, created an empire, writes Johnson, is 'almost too obvious to state-and so it is almost never said.' The American empire is unique: 'informal,' 'unacknowledged,' even 'accidental.' It is neither a Marxist 'imperialism' nor a British or Roman territorial dominium.

However, most of Johnson's diagnoses and prescriptions for the United States in the twenty-first century are simply a call for far-sighted approaches to contemporary problems.

Many inside the Washington beltway will view the work as heretical. Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, offers an unabashedly opinionated perspective on the emergence and current status of the American 'global empire.' In a new edition that addresses recent international events from September 11 to the war in Iraq, this now classic book remains as prescient and powerful as ever.Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books, 2000 268 pages $26.00īlowback is a worthy read for anyone concerned about the long-term future of the U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our conduct in the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster. In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. The term 'blowback,' invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended results of American actions abroad. Now with a new and up-to-date Introduction by the author, the bestselling account of the effect of American global policies, hailed as 'brilliant and iconoclastic' (Los Angeles Times)

Blowback the costs and consequences of american empire