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Dec 05, 2017
In The Shadows of the American Century is a sober look on America’s possible future. It’s broken into three parts with the the author’s personal history and interaction with the American Empire, a breakdown on how it formed and functioned, and scenarios of how it unfolds into the 2030’s. The first part is absolutely riveting with Mr. McCoy having gone toe to toe with the Central Intelligence Agency in the past. His family and person have been shaped by the American Empire, with sad consequences but with interesting lessons. Mr. McCoy breaks down how the Empire functions, with one of the most sophisitcated and rich intelligece networks around the globe. Past successful coups and counter-intelligence operations have won America important allies abroad. When it fails, mostly on the part of the CIA, the U.S. risks losing an entire region. McCoy briefly covers the serious damage of these failed operations, along with recently and poorly planned foreign policy adventures like The War on Terror. Being published in 2017, it is fantastically up to date with recent debacles of the torture prison system in Iraq, and even a failed operation in the Phillipines. Finally, McCoy predicts the likely downfall of Washington as a superpower by around 2030 with many wounds self-inflicted. This a rather depressing chapter in the book. The millennial generation will likely face a very stressful adulthood. Without many suggestions for a corrective course, it’s a fairly dark reading but it gives the reader an idea of what specifically the United States has been foolishly chasing the last few decades. It’s a left leaning reading. McCoy seems to push for a more diplomatic approach while lambasting the neo-conservative approach to foreign policy several times. He gives a rather positive review of Obama’s foreign policy while admitting some of Obama’s limitations. Though McCoy curiously ignored the disaster of Libya and its fall into lawlessness. No easy choices for what’s up ahead, better to have a clue of what could happen.