Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope Book

The low rating is not because I disagree with what Johnson is saying. On the contrary, I admit that I picked up this book so that it can reconfirm my own standing on the issue, that is, we need to roll back the empire before it brings about our demise. No orchestrating military coups, no manipulating foreign governments, no wars, no regime changes, no military bases anywhere in the world, no military interventions even for humanitarian reasons, no taking side in other countries' conflicts, no pushing democracy and human rights down other nations' throats, no writing other nations' constitutions, no taking a country and trying to remake it into a shining example for its region, no allowing large corporations to dictate our foreign policy for their profit, no being held hostage to our giant and blood-sucking leech of a military-industrial complex. You get the picture. Just mind our own business and fix our own problems. If after this, anybody messes with us, we go in, topple their government, kill their leaders, decimate their military, destroy their economy, and then get out. No liberal and neoconservative nation-building and winning-minds-and-hearts pipe dreams.

This book is not a book. Johnson has thrown together a bunch of essays written over a span of years, and as a result, it lacks cohesion and direction, and is annoyingly repetitive. I don't know Johnson, but he comes off as an anti-imperialist, anti-military leftist. That may be fine to some, but it makes the book a political polemic, not a presentation of hard facts showing that it's in our own interest to liquidate the empire voluntarily, like the British did, if we want to survive as a prosperous, democratic, and virtuous nation.