Many Americans have condemned the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.

In a completely original analysis, prizewinning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America's rise as a world power - from the 1890s through the Cold War - and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the 21st century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony - covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance. Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows.

To trace the evolution of the American state, Aaron Good takes a deep-politics approach. The term “deep state” was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it here refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions.

Volume one of One Nation Under Blackmail traces the origin of the network behind Jeffrey Epstein and his associates to the merging of organized crime and intelligence networks during World War II, following their most notable activities through the decades.

In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. US soldiers are stationed in more than 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In this book, Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington's martial appetites.

A decade after the cold war ended, policy makers and academics foresaw a new era of peace and prosperity, an era in which democracy and open trade would herald the "end of history." The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, sadly shattered these idyllic illusions, and John Mearsheimer's masterful new book explains why these harmonious visions remain utopian.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair - a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people's movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.

Not since the last American troops left Vietnam have we faced such a sudden vacuum in our foreign policy—not only of authority, but also of explanations of what happened, and what the future holds. Few analysts are better poised to address this moment than Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, intellectuals and critics whose work spans generations and continents.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community.

In fifteen short chapters, Chris Hedges astonishes us with his clear and cogent argument against war, not on philosophical grounds or through moral arguments, but in an irrefutable stream of personal encounters with the victims of war, from veterans and parents to gravely wounded American serviceman who served in the Iraq War, to survivors of the Holocaust, to soldiers in the Falklands War, among others. Hedges reported from Sarajevo, and was in the Balkans to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURN is a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?