Eventually, he writes, reconciliation will take the form of crisis and collapse. interests-and sometimes at the cost of American lives. Over time, these policies build up a "balance sheet" that eventually must be reconciled, almost always to the detriment of U.S.
"imperial" policies, which are often implemented without the knowledge of the American people. He adopts the CIA term "blowback" to describe the unintended consequences of U.S. Johnson's central concern is the consequence to the United States of neglecting its imperial position. 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." 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.
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