Could the United States actually be the last empire? Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building?
There was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written. Now, we have it in the form of Jeremy Scahill's latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.
When Adam Smith wrote "the prosperity, ...the splendour, and ... the duration of the empire," in 1754 (the source of my song title, "The Splendor of E...
This will be the nature of the great Afghan drawdown. The words "retreat," "loss," "defeat," "disaster," and their siblings and cousins won't be allowed on the premises.
We were an outsider civilization that was going to calm and shape the Arab Middle East. Today our enterprise is in ruin. The Ottoman metaphor is relevant because we tried, however unconsciously, to be like them.
Beyond the spectacle of the presidential race, the Washington consensus pursues business as usual. This is the season in which I wonder, with an ever-intensifying sense of urgency, what it would take to turn our political system into a democracy.
There's no guarantee that drones are a replacement for industrial-scale warfare. Meanwhile, we've endorsed a new expansion of presidential power, green-lighting unilateral and unaccountable authority over who should live and who should die.
There was once a vast and prosperous empire that was the most powerful in the land. It was mightier than the ancient Mayans, more popular than the Rom...
The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what's right is the prime motivator of all our military action.
Is there a democracy at either end of the missiles, warships or troop deployments? Suddenly I'm back on the sidewalk with the Occupy movement, which has arisen to confront the corporatocracy and its subservient media.
We're reeling toward our ecological and political comeuppance in a state of narcissistic denial; there is too little public seriousness about the issues that face us.
Empire through an internationally sourced feminized labor force. Isn't globalization wonderful?
I can't remember a time when the U.S. military has been stuck in so many war quagmires at once. Some political leaders must recognize that an empire enforced by war is counterproductive to economic and national security.
A new anti-war movement that can really challenge U.S. militarism is being born. People from across the political spectrum joined together opposing U.S. war and empire.
Chalmers Johnson led the way in understanding the dynamics of how states manipulated their policy conditions and environments to speed up economic growth. Johnson passed away Saturday; He was 79.
The Iraq War has left at least two huge and indelible imprints that no "page-turning" can easily eradicate, and the Afghan War seems poised to leave a third.
This summer the rise of the American military empire and the reasons for winding it down was examined in a trio of books associated with the website TomDispatch.com.
Thirty-five years from now, America's official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England.
While Turkey's rise does indeed reflect internal developments in that country, its growing influence mirrors the ebb of American power, a consequence of the catastrophic policies Washington has followed in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The god that organizes most American activity is the corporation. Consumerism and Militarism are two large cultures that have developed from the profit-driven fundamentalism of these businesses.
The American approach to empire has its peculiarities. Prominent among them is a variant of the "Great Man" theory of history. In their efforts to ex...
What if that phrase, which is the byword of many professions, became a sort of operating principle with which to proceed, individually and collectively, into the future?
Without serious reductions in the military budget and in its disbursement in every corner of the world resource market, we will almost certainly have reached a premature end to the Obama promise.
American enterprise has forgotten what is most important to our life as a nation -- and what is most important to us is what we can give to humanity.
