In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred W. Mccoy (review)

There have been many general works on the study of American decline and the limits faced by America's empire, topics that actually date back to the 1970s, with the end of the US postwar boom, the onset of the oil crisis in the Middle East, and the reality of US political and military setbacks in Southeast Asia. However, only a few scholars have studied American decline in detail. In his latest book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, Alfred McCoy—professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prolific scholar of Philippine history, US foreign policy and covert operations, and the politics of opium trafficking—undertakes an in-depth study of America's supposed impending fall. The book argues that America's policy-making elites have grown insular and "missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia" (27). Complacency, according to McCoy, endangers the very instruments the US has employed to maintain global hegemony, including "diplomatic alliances, CIA intervention, military technology, trade, torture, and global surveillance" (14).

The book is divided into eight chapters. The first part, "Understanding the US Empire," covers chapters 1 to 3, where McCoy studies the development of America's empire. He first talks about how US global reach grew from the turn of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by its military bases in the Pacific and Caribbean, to the era of mobile bases, drone warfare, and militarized space in the twenty-first century (34–38, 45–56). McCoy discusses the evolving schools of thought (such as the American exceptionalist school, the revisionist Wisconsin school, the imperium, the hegemonic, and the pragmatic conservative schools) on empire and the US, concluding that "there is still surprisingly little serious study of history's most powerful empire" (44) and the geopolitics involved in maintaining superpower dominance.

To sustain its dominance, the US supported and gave massive amounts of aid to subordinate elite leaders such as Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and military regimes in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Arab monarchies to further US interests across Asia and Africa. For the US, the unacceptable alternatives were insubordinate elites and communist leaders (61–65). However, according to McCoy, the US's reliance on unpopular, ineffectual clients actually weakened US influence (65–79).

It also did not help US influence when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and criminal syndicates engaged in the profitable worldwide drug trade based in Central America and Afghanistan. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA ended up looking the other way as the illegal drug sale was used to fund the CIA-supported mujahideen groups then fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1992, the Taliban ultimately ended up winning the civil war, sustained by opium revenues that also became a source of livelihood for many Afghans (81–96). After the US involvement in Afghanistan post-9/11, ineffectual US efforts to suppress the Taliban insurgency, including its sources of income such as opium, brought about an endless cycle of American troop surges, as the US sought to shore up a weak and corrupt government largely based in Kabul and the major cities. This situation has made it difficult for the US to leave Afghanistan (96–106).

McCoy looks at instruments of US power in the second part, "US Strategies for Survival," which covers chapters 4 to 6. According to McCoy, the intelligence network regime in the Philippines provided the beginnings of a worldwide information surveillance apparatus (109–15). In its former colony and its own territory, the US applied a computerized information-gathering system for counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War. The survey of the US surveillance regime in chapter 4 concludes with a discussion of the...