By the end of 2011, the United States had elite special operations forces in around 120 of the 192 countries recognized by the United Nations, with U.S. military bases in more than half of the world’s nation-states.
Yet despite this global empire — some would say because of it — the United States is a country today that is characterized not so much by peace and prosperity as by poverty and anxiety.
While the rhetoric of the political class in Washington boasts of fearlessness in the face of terror, the United States, writes author Tom Engelhardt in a new collection of essays, has become a nation ruled by fear, characterized by a cynical, institutional overreaction to the relatively minor threat that is international terrorism.
The country that proudly claims to have defeated an evil empire now spends billions of dollars to prevent so much as a perception of risk, looking more and more like its one-time superpower rival.
Politicians from both major parties, aided by the generals, military contractors, and corporate media outlets that stand to benefit from a militarized, militarist United States, speak of bravery and resolve in but two contexts: with respect to their millions of unemployed subjects — keep your chin up, kid! — and when rhetorically confronting the endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary, they use to sell a bellicose foreign policy of endless war.
