Opinion

The Future of the American Empire

In the early 1970s, before he was an award-winning author and the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Alfred McCoy was a young rebel academic who waded into the war zone in Southeast Asia to investigate the relationship between the CIA, crime syndicates, and local drug lords. The result, which the Agency tried unsuccessfully to suppress, was his classic The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. In the 45 years since, McCoy has consistently probed the underside of American global power, analyzing how the United States uses covert interventions, local proxies, torture, and worldwide surveillance to maintain its global empire.

Those decades of investigation have yielded a new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, which investigates America’s use of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances and reveals the contours of the shadow war that Washington wages to maintain its status as the world’s sole superpower. I recently asked McCoy to tell me about the book, the world of covert interventions, the deep state, and whether Donald Trump is accelerating the fall of the American empire.