Sad to read after completing Chalmer Johnson's book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)
about the militarization and excessive spending on 'defense', writing in 2006:The likelihood is that the United States will maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2. In might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, or simply for some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other nations. We will have to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it. As Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, concludes, "U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable...The empire can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states are no longer reliable....The result is that the empire can no longer pay for enough of the professional troops it need to fulfill its self-assumed imperial tasks." [71] (269-270)
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