This collection of Paul Craig Roberts essays explores the extreme dangers in Washington's imposition of vassalage on other countries and Washington's resurrection of distrust among nuclear powers, the very distrust that Reagan and Gorbachev worked to eliminate. Roberts explains how the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the only check on Washington's ability to act unilaterally. The United States' position as the sole remaining superpower led to the euphoric proclamation of "the end of history" and to Washington's presumption of the victory of "American democratic-capitalism" over all other systems. The neoconservatives became entrenched in successive American administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Their ideology of US global hegemony, the doctrine that no other power will be allowed to arise that could constrain US unilateral action, has become a foundational premise of US foreign policy and has led to reckless intervention in Ukraine and an irresponsible assault on Russian national interest. In pursuit of hegemony, Washington has expanded NATO to Russia's border, instigated "colour revolutions" in former constituent parts of the Soviet Union, announced a "pivot to Asia" to encircle China, orchestrated a coup in Ukraine, demonized Putin, and imposed warlike sanctions against Russia. These reckless and irresponsible actions have brought back the risk of nuclear war. This succession of events has impelled Roberts, following an illustrious career in government, journalism and academia, to perform the clarifying function abandoned by the mainstream media of examining the agendas at work and the risks entailed. His insightful commentary is followed all over the world. In February 2015, Roberts was invited to address a major International conference in Moscow hosted by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he delivered the address which is the title of this book. In Roberts' assessment, Washington's drive for hegemony is not only unnecessary but unrealistic and filled with peril for the world at large. This book is a call to awareness that ignorance and propaganda are leading the world toward unspeakable disaster.

Even as the view of America as a rogue state consolidates abroad, Americans appear largely bystanders at the spectacle of their government running amok. People forget the myriad instances of their government's flouting of the Constitution and international legal norms - if ever they were aware of them in the first place - accepting to live in the increasingly pernicious "new normal" with little protest. This remarkable anthology of columns documents and reminds us of the extraordinary developments that, in their accumulation, have led to the destruction of accountable and moral government in the US. Few American commentators have cut more clearly through the deepening deceit, hypocrisy and outright criminality that has infested official Washington since 9/11 than Paul Craig Roberts. His scathing critique sheds much-needed light on the country's impending nightmare - economic collapse, internal repression, ongoing wars, and rising rejection by friends and foes alike. How America Was Lost marks Roberts as one of the most prescient and courageous moral commentators in America today. America's fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government's 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government's account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based. These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington's deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar's role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar's value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called "entitlements" as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives. With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history. The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course.

The political and social upheavals that have transformed the economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the past ten years have sparked considerable interest and speculation on the part of Western observers. Less noted, though hardly less dramatic, has been the revolutionary spread of free market capitalism throughout much of Latin America during the same period. In a wide-ranging survey that illuminates both the history and present business climate of the region, Paul Roberts and Karen Araujo describe the economic transformation currently taking place in Latin America. And as they do so, they also reexamine many of the prevailing orthodoxies concerning international development and the regulation of markets, and point to the success of privatization and free enterprise in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile as harbingers of the economic future for both hemispheres.
The potential strength of the economies of Central and South America has always been obvious, the authors point out. Abundant natural resources, combined with vast expanses of fertile land and a sophisticated and relatively cohesive social culture, are found throughout the region. But the authors show that the Latin American nations were slow to discard the economic and social climate that they had inherited from their Spanish colonial masters, who had ruled by selling government jobs--creating a network of privilege--and by suppressing through over-regulation the development of markets for goods, services, and capital. The prevalent cultural attitude in Latin America was hostile to commerce, trade, and work--indeed, it was more socially acceptable to court government privilege than to compete in markets. The authors further show that U.S. aid packages to the region actually reinforced this culture of privilege and further hampered the growth of a free economy. Not until the 1980s did the picture begin to change, largely in response to the economic crises brought on through catastrophic national debts and hyperinflation. The book describes the efforts of the Salinas, Pinochet, and Menem governments to combat the established interests of the local elites and the international development agencies, to privatized state industries, and to established independent markets. In this new climate, private capitalists and entrepreneurs are feted and celebrated, and productivity has risen to levels unimagined only a few years before. But this dramatic economic turnaround, the authors show, is a mixed blessing for the U.S. For if it provides us with a vast new market for our goods, it has also created a powerful new competitor for capital investment. To keep American and foreign capitalists investing in America, the government needs to make changes, which the authors outline in a provocative conclusion.
Central and South America have a combined population of 460 million people, a potential market greater than the United States and Canada combined or the European Community. Thus the rise of free market capitalism in Latin America is of vital interest to the United States. The CapitalistRevolution in Latin America provides an insightful portrait of this dramatic economic turn-around, illuminating the economic consequences for our own society.

In this updated and expanded edition of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions," Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton renew their valiant campaign to reclaim that which is rightly ours-liberty protected by the rule of law. They show how crusading legislators and unfair prosecutors are remaking American law into a weapon wielded by the government and how the erosion of the legal principles we hold dear-such as habeas corpus and the prohibition against self-incrimination-is destroying the presumption of innocence. A new introduction and new chapters cover recent marquee cases and make this provocative book essential reading for anyone who cringes at the thought of unbridled state power and sees our civil liberties slowly slipping away in the name of the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, and the War on Terror.

The first edition of this seminal book in 1971 pointed out the fatal defects of Marxist theory that would lead to the collapse of the Soviet economy. In this revised edition, Paul Craig Roberts examines how reality triumphed over Marxist theory and the implications for the future of Russia and eastern Europe. In 1971, Roberts created a firestorm among professional Sovietologists by proclaiming that the economies of the USSR and its East Bloc allies were doomed because their 'planned' economies were, in reality, anything but planned. Expanding on his original ideas, Roberts demonstrates in this book the fatal shortcomings of Marxist economies, ranging from misallocation of resources to ersatz capitalistic concepts grafted onto a system that calls for production without regard to profit. Roberts argues that the economies of the nations emerging from the USSR's collapse must grasp the profound truths in this book if they are to become viable.