Tom Dispatch: Chalmers Johnson Dismantels its Empire

Though Chalmers Johnson died on November 20, 2010, his spirit lives on in the most active of ways: In his last years he regularly chewed over the profligacy of the Pentagon, our unbridled urge for military spending, and our penchant for war-making and war preparations without end. He was convinced that we had long passed the point at which we were still a"republic", that we had decisively opted for empire, and, long before the US intelligence community came to that conclusion, that we were on the downward side, helped along by what he called a "military Keynesianism" run amok. One question he raised regularly in conversation, but never answered in print, was: What would it mean for the United States, ie a great military superpower, to bankrupt itself? After all, we aren't Argentina. But if there was no obvious model to draw on, he never doubted one thing: If we did not change our ways and reverse course on empire, we would certainly be a candidate for debtor's prison and a wreck of a country. In his last major essay, also the title of his last book, he turned to the issue of dismantling the empire, knowing full well that it wasn't on any imaginable Washington agenda. Having just lived through one of the more bizarre months in the history of the former republic, what I recently termed "a psychotic spectacle of American decline, it seemed to me that Johnson's dismantling essay couldn't be more timely, and so, on this quiet Sunday in August, on the weekend the author of Blowback would have turned 80, so I am bringing it back from the TomDispatch archives.