Overwrought Empire: The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power

tomdispatch.com — Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.  Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush.  It was victory with a capital V.  The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet. Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.” And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different. 

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