Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

• Author: BANDOW, DOUG
• Position: Review

* Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Pp. xix, 268. $26.00 cloth.

The United States is a unique imperial power. In what columnist Charles Krauthammer calls the "unipolar moment," this country stands as an international colossus. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it dominates the world in a manner not seen for least 150 years, and perhaps much longer.

Although Great Britain once had global reach, with its dominant navy and far-flung imperial possessions, it alone could not impose its will on its most important international competitors--the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia. Eventually, and predictably, it was eclipsed by several of them.

In contrast, the United States possesses not only the ability to intervene everywhere, but the ability to defeat any adversary. Russia is a wreck. Japan has minuscule international influence compared to its economic strength. China is a rising power, but it remains a military pygmy. Even western Europe, an international aggregation whose population and economy exceed those of the United States, has only 10 to 15 percent of America's combat capability. With varying amounts of effort, the United States could defeat any (and probably all) of those great countries if it chose to do so. Still, all is not well.

Not that U.S. officials have noticed. Members of America's foreign-policy elite apparently see themselves as the anointed spokesmen for the "international community," whatever that is. No matter what they do, they act as if they are implementing justice and truth, if not the American Way. Alas, many people on the receiving end of U.S. policy have a different perception.

America is an empire. As Chalmers Johnson puts it in his new book Blowback, "Perhaps the Romans did not find it strange to have her troops in Gaul, nor the British in South Africa" (p. 4). But such foreign commitments were considered alien to America throughout most of its history. That tradition was abandoned during the Cold War, but only for compelling reasons. Now the Cold War is over, and, observes Johnson,

the one subject beyond discussion ... is the fact that, a decade after the end of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of American troops, supplied with the world's most advanced weaponry, sometimes including nuclear arms, are stationed on over sixty-one base complexes in nineteen countries worldwide, using the Department of Defense's narrowest definition of...