In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.

• Author: Coyne, Christopher J.
• Position: Book review

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power

By Alfred W. McCoy

New York: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Pp. 359. $18 paperback.

Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent much of his career researching the foundations, operations, and consequences of the American empire. In The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), McCoy drew on fieldwork and interviews to document how the CLA was complicit in the Southeast Asian heroin trade as part of the U.S. government's larger Cold War strategy. The CIA tried and failed to suppress the publication of the book and to have McCoy expelled from Yale, where he was a Ph.D. student at the time. His subsequent book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), updated and expanded this argument, documenting how CIA involvement in the drug trade persisted over the intervening decades. According to McCoy, CIA involvement in fostering the global heroin supply was a key factor behind the U.S. heroin pandemic in the 1980s.

McCoy then shifted his scholarly focus to understanding the U.S. government's torture practices. In A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), he documented the CIA's development of psychological torture techniques, which can be traced back to the Cold War. The torture employed by the U.S. government following the attacks on September 11, 2001, was not an abnormality but, instead, had been a systematic feature of the U.S. government's foreign policy since the Cold War.

Finally, in Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) McCoy traced the origins of the present-day U.S. surveillance state to the occupation of the Philippines, which began in 1899. At the time, the U.S. government established a state-of-the-art surveillance system to combat Filipinos who resisted the occupation and instead demanded their independence. The techniques and methods developed in the Philippines eventually returned to the United States and served as the foundation for the government's current surveillance apparatus.

This context is useful for understanding McCoy's new book, In the Shadows of the American Century. McCoy skillfully integrates his previous scholarship to explain the rise of the...