Reviews for The future of the United States government toward the year 2000

The average rating for The future of the United States government toward the year 2000 based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-26 00:00:00 Brent Lindsey Having read 'Arsenals of Folly' by Richard Rhodes, and keeping an eye on the current situation, I can see history repeating itself. I also find interesting the references to short stories, novels and movies, some of which are prescient. Such as the short story "Top Secret" which appeared in the magazine 'Authentic Science Fiction' in 1953. It's about a group of friendly men in business suits that have a secret facility in a small town. Turns out they were Soviets building an atomic device in the US. One gets a different view of political figures. Ike noted "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies...a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." Yet he allowed us to become more deeply involved in Vietnam and Iran at the instigation of our 'allies' in Europe. During Kennedy's administration, the Army Chief of Staff, George Decker, warned against military involvement in Southeast Asia. He was not re-appointed. A similar incident occurred during Bush 43's first term. Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, warned that an order of magnitude more troops would be needed in Iraq than Rumsfeld was proposing. He was not re-appointed. The author also provides a brief description of the attack on the USS Liberty which clearly shows the Israelis knew what they were doing. But thanks to AIPAC, little was done and Israel still receives strong support. The book actually supports the ideas of "Imperial Hubris". Various examples are given of intelligence and counter-intelligence failures and exaggerationsdue to hubris. A couple of ideas stated in this book are: one, our alleged allies are not really out allies; two, perhaps barely noted because it is stated as pertaining to how the Soviet Union could have saved itself, "eschew the ruinous compulsion to devote so staggering a percentage of its total resources to military preparations."

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-12 00:00:00 Justin Morales It's rare that an author's political biases so strongly influence my feelings on a book. But Derek Leebaert's fervent beliefs don't leak through - they splatter the pages with his bias. He's obsessed with proving the military-industrial complex doesn't exist - don't tell Eisenhower! (Not to mention that the technology he praises in the latter parts of the book only exists because of massive state military funding.) America's militarism is dismissed because it's not like Prussia's - I guess things are only bad if they are the worst thing they can be? The Great Leap Forward killed 43 million people, which is apparently totally not demographically impossible... (My eyes are rolling pretty hard as I am writing this, as you might guess.) But the icing on the cake goes to the section on page 353 where, after talking about the American war in Vietnam, he goes on to say: "It was in Czechoslovakia that upheaval against real imperialism drew unusual courage from the young." (Emphasis mine.) His casualty figures for that? 90. America can kill hundreds of thousands or millions in a war to retain geopolitical control of a country, but that's not really imperialism, guys! So yeah, that should explain the one star. What could have been a good book, ruined by the author's inability to account for and control his biases. Also, my notes say "the missile gap was totally cool", and I don't quite know what that means, but I am including it anyways because it wouldn't surprise if any of the ways you can interpret that are true.