Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United
States as we know it -- in the very near future
A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on
it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far
more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as
the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and
global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be
over except for the shouting.
It might collapse even sooner if the bankers get their way or a solar flare destroys the internet and power line or a large incoming object plunges into an Ice Age or a World War... Then there is the problem of food production...
Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look
at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate
is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires
regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for
the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years
for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States,
counting from the crucial year 2003.
Future historians are likely to identify the Bush
administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America’s
downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past
empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first
century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible
tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.
But have no doubt: when Washington’s global dominion finally
ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means
for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have
discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on
a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the
economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic
unrest.
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate
that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate
rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The
American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will
be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by
2030.
Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence
Council admitted for the first time that America’s global power was indeed on a
declining trajectory. In one of its
periodic futuristic reports,
Global Trends 2025, the Council
cited “the transfer of global wealth and
economic power now under way, roughly from West to East” and “without precedent
in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States’
relative strength — even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington,
however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for
American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would
long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally”
for decades to come.
No such luck. Under current projections, the United States
will find itself in second place behind China (already the world’s second
largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050.
Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in
applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as
America’s current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without
adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw
a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple
canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington’s last best
hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that
year, however, China’s global network of communications satellites, backed by
the world’s most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational,
providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space
and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every
quadrant of the globe.
Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d’Orsay
before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be
gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January,
President Obama
offered the
reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of
America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden
ridiculed the very
idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy’s prophecy that
we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of
our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the
establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph
Nye
waved away talk of
China’s economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic
decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.
Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have
a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August
2010
found that 65 percent of Americans believed
the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already,
Australia and
Turkey, traditional
U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint
air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America’s closest economic
partners are backing away from Washington’s opposition to China’s rigged
currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a
gloomy New York Times headline
summed the moment up
this way: “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and
Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”
Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United
States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and
wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington’s wishful thinking, let’s
use the National Intelligence Council’s own futuristic methodology to suggest
four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global
power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying
assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic
decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are
hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even
collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.
Economic Decline: Present Situation
Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant
position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking
share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the
end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.
By 2008, the United States had already
fallen to number three in global
merchandise exports, with just 11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for
China and 16 percent for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that
this trend will reverse itself.
Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation
is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still
number two behind Japan in worldwide patent
applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a
blistering 400 percent increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in
2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations
surveyed by the
Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in
“global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding
substance to these statistics, in October China’s Defense Ministry unveiled the
world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful,
said one U.S. expert,
that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.
Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system,
that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its
competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with
university degrees, the country
sank to 12th place in
2010. The World Economic Forum
ranked the United
States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university
math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in
the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home,
not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the
United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.
Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp
criticism of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other
countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best
on economic policy,”
observed Kenneth S.
Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In
mid-2009, with the world’s central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in
U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev
insisted that it was
time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one
formerly strong reserve currency.”
Simultaneously, China’s central bank governor
suggested that the
future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual
nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to
come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson
has argued, “to
hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”
Economic Decline: Scenario 2020
After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in
distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its
special status as the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports
soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury
notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military
budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces
back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now,
however, it is far too late.
Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills,
China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively
challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid
soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real
wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates,
often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of
disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with
thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening
military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention
as the American Century ends in silence.
Oil Shock: Present Situation
One casualty of America’s waning economic power has been its
lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America’s gas-guzzling economy in the
passing lane, China became the world’s number one energy consumer this summer,
a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael
Klare
has argued that this
change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”
By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the
world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage
over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the
National Intelligence Council
has warned, in just 15 years two countries,
Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”
Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now
draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap
extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf
of Mexico was not BP’s sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone
saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to
search for what Klare
calls “tough oil”
miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.
Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have
suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were
to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain
to rise — and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat
aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative
energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too
little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades,
doubling its
dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have
risen from 36 percent of energy consumed in
the U.S. to
66 percent.
Oil Shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that
a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil
shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in
just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar’s
plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy
payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of
U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of
long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign
exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless
billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran’s
exploitation of the world largest percent natural gas field at South Pars in
the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to
protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a
coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance
and affirm that China’s new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth
patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic
pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island
base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs
Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a
homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse
announcements,
the “Carter Doctrine,”
by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid
to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless
supplies of low-cost oil from that region — logistics, exchange rates, and
naval power — evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an
insignificant 12 percent of its energy
needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on
imported oil for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a
hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly
expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into
freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained.
With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars
flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed.
With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military
forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and
the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.
Military Misadventure: Present Situation
Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often
plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among
historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically
compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new
territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational
even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or
humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.
Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that
drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat
becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered
in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be
massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire
destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S.
occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over
the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000,
expanded the war into Pakistan, and
extended its commitment
to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this
guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.
Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014
So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that
seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S.
military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in
Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis
abroad are multifold.
It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in
embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by
Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm.
Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander
looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the
city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky”
gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.
Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout
the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the
tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a
series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the
country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon
in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops
in Kabul and Kandahar.
Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over
Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its
backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians
in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and
refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special
Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks
a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black
clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American
actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this
“America’s Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end
of the British Empire.
World War III: Present Situation
In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S.
and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American
“lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As
Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of
Britain’s global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits
from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military
challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast
maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In
August, after Washington
expressed a “national interest” in the
South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim,
Beijing’s official Global Times
responded angrily,
saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has
raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon
reported that Beijing
now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western
Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United
States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare
capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon
calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.”
With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well
as the
launch of two
satellites in January 2010 and
another in July, for a total of five,
Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an
“independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications,
and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
To check China and extend its military position globally,
Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space
robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.
Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a
cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a
single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan,
the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones — reaching from
stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient
modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone
operations into the exosphere by quietly
launching the X-37B
unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The
X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the
full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike
anything that has gone before.
World War III: Scenario 2025
The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and
untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a
reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that
the Air Force itself
used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game,
however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace
overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might
actually be fought.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While
cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest
home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the
Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui
choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black.
Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand’s
operations center in
Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired
anonymously, show the
distinctive digital fingerprints
of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese
“malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S.
“Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet
over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the
rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal
missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this
formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes
a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying”
satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit
robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above
the Earth, ordering them to launch their
“Triple Terminator” missiles at China’s 35
satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its
Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle
into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later,
sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby
orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.
As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6
satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to
crack the malware’s devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the
navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets
begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded.
Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is
exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long
called “the ultimate
high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the
globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single
human casualty.
A New World Order?
Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios
suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in
American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be
envisioning.
As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take
cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas
military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal
on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to
weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to
rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.
Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and
technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As
happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will
undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways,
create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to
spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a
generation or more of economic misery.
As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of
possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise
of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both
China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts,
regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key
instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems
to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.
In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition
of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an
international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly
unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak
of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational
elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the
multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
In “Planet of Slums,” Mike Davis offers at least a partial
vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people
already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion
by 2030) will make “the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World… the
distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over
some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of
repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the
narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with
suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new
global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China,
Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain,
Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion,
akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity
circa 1900.
Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a
return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated
before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its
endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would
dominate its immediate region — Brasilia in South America, Washington in North
America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the
maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,”
the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through
an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.
All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the
future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of
historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the
unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America’s decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from
2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of
that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like
water tossed onto desert sands,
wasted trillions of
desperately needed dollars.
My book Sand Pirates covers this...
If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all
away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the
American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and
there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars,
our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our
antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to
assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country’s role and
prosperity in a changing world.
Europe’s empires are gone and America’s imperium is going.
It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like
Britain’s success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its
interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture:
CIA Interrogation, "From the Cold War to the War on Terror." Later
this year, "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines,
and the Rise of the Surveillance State," a forthcoming book of his, will
explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of
internal security measures here at home.
Somebody has to tell it like it is…www.GuardDogBooks.com read, The Frog
is Cooked and Sand Pirates
