RENOWNED HISTORIAN Alfred McCoy on the United States as an Empire in Decline and the Crucial Role CIA Protection of the Global Narcotics Trade Played in this Process

RENOWNED HISTORIAN Alfred McCoy said: “The United States is an empire in decline.

Alfred McCoy is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations.

Alfred W. McCoy: The History of the Southeast Asian Drug Trade

Alfred W. McCoy on the Opium Trade in Afghanistan

Books
Laos: War and Revolution, with Nina S. Adams. New York: Harper & Row (1970).

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. New York: Harper & Row (1972).

Priests on Trial: Father Gore and Father O’Brien Caught in the Crossfire Between Dictatorship and Revolution. New York: Penguin Books (1984).

Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy. New Haven: Yale University Press (1999).

A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Metropolitan Books (2006). ISBN 978-0805082487.

Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press (2009).

Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press (2009).

An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press (2009).

Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press (2012).

Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press (2012).

Beer of Broadway Fame: The Piel Family and Their Brooklyn Brewery. SUNY Press (2016).

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US
Global Power. Chicago: Haymarket Books (2017).

To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Chicago: Haymarket Books (2021).

War On Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy. Routledge (2021).

Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. Haymarket Books (2026).

Curriculum Vitae

The Birth of the American Deep State.

Talk – Alfred McCoy – Surveillance State: The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus

I had the great pleasure and opportunity to view an earlier version of this presentation below by Alfred McCoy, PhD, on the “Surveillance State: Philippine Pacification & the Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus”. I was able to briefly discuss his remarks with Dr. McCoy afterwards and have him sign my copy of The Politics of Heroin.

The shocking, disturbing DOGE revelations concerning USAID and the sinister dark side of the deep state have their predecessors. For decades Alfred W. McCoy has led the way in exposing this infamy, duplicity, and egregious conduct.

Alfred McCoy – Surveillance State: The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus

Check out this amazing presentation by Alfred W. McCoy, PhD, on the “Surveillance State: Philippine Pacification & the Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus” given April 23, 2010 and sponsored by the SE Asia Center at the Jackson School at the University of Washington.

Just days earlier I had the opportunity see Professor McCoy deliver the University of Tulsa’s Settle/Cadenhead Memorial Lecture, “The Surveillance State, Foreign Wars and the Rise of the U. S. Internal Security Apparatus.” They are essentially identical presentations.

This fascinating lecture confirmed in spades everything I have learned from Garet Garrett, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Chalmers Johnson, and Stephen Kinzer about the American Imperial State — about the decline of the republic and the rise of empire. McCoy outlined the birth of the Surveillance State in the information technology revolution of the 1870s and 1880s (invention of the telephone, typewriter, widespread photographic film processing, electrical and telegraph networks, punch cards, and biometrics such as fingerprinting) and its later convergence with the imperatives of empire in the American colonial occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

It was during the Philippine Insurrection that modern police and military intelligence techniques and data collection technology emerged, later becoming the key component of the National Security State. McCoy particularly pointed to the ongoing seminal role Ralph Henry Van Deman played in this process. His spell-binding presentation was largely based upon his two recent books, Policing the Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State; and Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano.

From suppressing the Filipino Insurrection following the Spanish-American War to the destructive counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, these martial exercises in unlawful, extra-constitutional behavior have continued unabated.

And as DOGE has revealed concerning these nefarious, supposedly foreign-directed machinations, like the prodigal son of New Testament scriptures, they have come home.