The United States of Fear; How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis

Description

In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet’s “sole superpower” would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the “Soviet path”—pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security—and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff. This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country—gripped by terror fantasies—was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned. Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist “sole superpower” of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier. © 2011 by Tom Engelhardt Praise Introduction American Warscapes 1 The United States of Fear 2 Entering the Soviet Era 3 Their Dead and Ours 4 Obama’s Flailing Wars 5 Waist Deep in the Washington Quagmire 6 Living with War 7 Imperial Decline Afterword On Being a Critic A Note on the Text Acknowledgments About