Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the US was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died on Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California. He was 79.
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, said his wife, Sheila.
Johnson was a consultant to the CIA for many years, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union became concerned that the US was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.
In Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), Johnson wondered why US military spending continued to rise after the Cold War had ended.
He concluded that through a network of more than 700 strategic bases around the world, the US was committed to creating global hegemony and he worried about the consequences for US democracy.
It was a theme he expanded upon in three subsequent books, The Sorrows of Empire (2004), Nemesis (2006) and Dismantling the Empire (2010).
Summarizing the series in Dismantling the Empire, Johnson said that “blowback” meant more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to US policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.
“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback,” he wrote.
To maintain its empire, he said, the US “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”
In a review of The Sorrows of Empire in the New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under then-US president Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.”
He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”
After receiving his master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1961, both from Berkeley, he joined the university’s political science faculty.
He led the China Center at Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and was chairman of the political science department from 1976 to 1980.
In 1988, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach at its new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired in 1992.
Besides his wife, the former Sheila Knipscheer, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson.
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