The United States of Fear

The creator of TomDispatch.com “focuses on the specific absurdities of American wars . . . strident, passionate, and problem-solving” (Mother Jones).

In 2008, when the US 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.

Praise for Tom Engelhardt and The United States of Fear

“Engelhardt is absorbing and provocative. Everything he writes is of a satisfyingly congruent piece.” —The New York Times

“A politician’s worst nightmare.” —Mother Jones

“Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post-9/11 age.” —Andrew J. Bacevich, New York Times–bestselling author

“Tom Engelhardt, as always, focuses his laser-like intelligence on a core problem that the media avoid . . . A stunning polemic.” —Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear and The Monster at Our Door