Is the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?

I believe that we're close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. ... The world's balance of power didn't change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that's what we did.

Has our "leadership" traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world's newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: "... my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."

Johnson's well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what's needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.

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Mark Karlin: You've written a three-part series of books on the United States as an empire. The first was called Blowback. The second is The Sorrows of the Empire. And, now, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. That's kind of a doomsday declension there.

Chalmers Johnson: I guess you could say that. It's inadvertent. I didn't set out to write three volumes. I don't know whether Gibbons set out to write The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire. But one led to the other.

The first was written well before 9/11, and it was concerned with what I perceived to be the American public's lack of understanding that most of the foreign policy problems of the 21st century were going to be things left over from the Cold War. Above all, I argue that our numerous clandestine activities, some of which are almost totally disreputable, will come back to haunt us.

The second book followed on the first, in that it was a broad analysis of what I called our military-based empire, an empire of 737 American military bases in over 130 countries around the world. That number is the official Pentagon count. They are genuine military bases. They're very extensive. They are not, as some defenders of the Pentagon like to say, just Marine guards. We haven't got 700 embassies around the world. The Sorrows of Empire was written as we were preparing for our invasion of Iraq, and it was published virtually on the day that we invaded.

Karlin: And now Nemesis is your cataclysmic conclusion. Not long ago, it was considered sort of radical to say that America is a neo-colonial empire. But you embrace that concept in many ways.

Johnson: Right.

Karlin: The perspective in much of the neocon writing, in The Weekly Standard, for instance, is that America is an empire. It's a superpower. It can take whatever it wants. Basically, the rule of thumb becomes, if you challenge the U.S. assertion of military control and dominance, you're an enemy of the United States. You don't have to threaten the United States, but merely oppose the imposition of the military authority.

Johnson: Quite true. The roots of this military empire go back, of course, to World War II, which is when we conquered Germany, Japan, Italy, places of that sort, and did not withdraw after the war was over. We've been in Okinawa, for example, ever since 1945. The people there have been fighting against us ever since 1945, in three major revolts -- they hate it.

But the critical point comes with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz, who was then in the Department of Defense working for Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, wrote that our policy now is to prevent any nation, or combination of nations, from ever having the kind of power that could challenge us in any way militarily.