Understanding America’s Greatest Existential Threats

Understanding America’s Greatest Existential Threats
Author: Dr. J. R. Maxwell
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1525553836

In this introductory volume, readers will learn about the vital role that the various Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors play in America, in the context of homeland security. The protection, maintenance, and monitoring of these interdependent CI assets is a shared responsibility of governments, private sector owner/operators, first responders, and all those involved in homeland security and emergency management. As this foundational learning resource demonstrates, rapidly advancing technologies combined with exponential growth in demand on the aging infrastructure of America’s power grid is setting the stage for a potentially catastrophic collapse that would paralyze each and every facet of civilian life and military operations. This meticulously researched primer will guide readers through the known world of power failures and cyber-attacks to the emerging threat from a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). A HEMP would cause cascading failures in the power grid, communications, water treatment facilities, oil refineries, pipelines, banking, supply chain management, food production, air traffic control, and all forms of transportation. Each chapter in America’s Greatest Existential Threat (Vol. 1) begins with learning objectives and ends with a series of review questions to assess take-up of the chapter material. Similarly, subsequent volumes will explore HEMP and emerging issues in closer detail with current research and analysis now in development.

Existential Threats

Existential Threats
Author: Lisa Vox
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812249194

In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination.

Understanding America

Understanding America
Author: Peter H Schuck
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2009-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786745487

What is America? Is it a hegemonic superpower, composed of ruthlessly selfish capitalists? Or is it a land of hope and glory, a shelter for the huddled masses, and a beacon of freedom and enlightenment? The definition of this complex nation has been debated substantially, yet all seem to agree on one thing: it is unique. The idea of an exceptional America can be traced all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century observations of a newly formed democracy that seemed determined to distinguish itself from the rest. Little, it seems, has changed. Building on de Tocqueville's concept of American exceptionalism, this collection of essays, contributed by some of the nation's top scholars and thinkers, takes on the weighty task of sizing up America in a way its people and others can comprehend. Far more than simple history, they outline the current state of American institutions and policies -- from the legal system to marriage to the military to the Drug War -- and anticipate where these are headed in the future.

The Tragedy of American Science

The Tragedy of American Science
Author: Clifford D. Conner
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 164259203X

A look at the destructive history of science-for-profit, including its toll on the US pandemic response, by the author of A People’s History of Science. Despite a facade of brilliant technological advances, American science has led humanity to the brink of interrelated disasters. In The Tragedy of American Science, historian of science Clifford D. Conner describes the dual processes by which this history has unfolded since the Second World War, addressing the corporatization and the militarization of science in the US. He examines the role of private profit considerations in determining the direction of scientific inquiry—and the ways those considerations have dangerously undermined the integrity of sciences impacting food, water, air, medicine, and the climate. In addition, he explores the relationship between scientific industries and the US military, discussing the innumerable financial and human scientific resources that have been diverted from other critical areas in order to further military aggrandizement and technological development. While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible utopian dream—and the first step to a better future is grappling with the mistakes of the past.

Embracing Communist China

Embracing Communist China
Author: James Fanell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1648210600

For decades, the United States has underestimated the threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In doing so, it has left our country vulnerable to their devious plans—a profound, strategic miscalculation. As a result of this carelessness, the United States is at risk of losing its dominant position in global politics. But how did this happen? How was it possible that the US could lose its dominant position after its Cold War victory and allow the rise of a peer enemy over a short period of time—about thirty years? In Embracing Communist China, authors James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer get to the bottom of this heinous miscalculation. Broken down into three central arguments, Fanell and Thayer lay out not only the reason for China’s rise in power, but how the United States could have prevented it. Due to failures on the parts of the national security commission, strategists, military personnel, and the intelligence community, a historical case of “threat deflation” caused our country to refute all supplied information of China’s growing power. By not taking this seriously, the PRC has risen with the goal of usurping the US as a global superpower. US business interests and financiers trumped strategy. Seeing China as a source of cheap labor for manufacturing, investment, and intellectual labor—including for research and development—the mighty dollar’s influence reigned supreme, overlooking the big picture. With their advancements, China used its political warfare strategy to promote threat deflation under Deng Xiaoping. As such, the PRC—learning key lessons from the Soviet Union’s mistakes in the Cold War—focused on elites from all aspects of US and other Western societies, enriching them and shaping their perception of China and of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while using the enticement of a growing market to influence their behavior. As Americans, we can no longer think of China as a secondary power, but one that is looking to remove the US as the most powerful country in the world. By understanding the profound strategic failures made by the US are we are able to correct them and so defeat the PRC as the we did the Soviet Union.

Defending the Arsenal

Defending the Arsenal
Author: Adam B. Lowther
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315460688

This volume takes an unashamed pro-nuclear modernization position and argues for designing and fielding new nuclear warheads and delivery systems (submarine, ICBM, and bomber) while also arguing against signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or agreeing to further reductions in the nuclear arsenal. It also argues that nuclear deterrence remains as relevant today, perhaps more, than it was during the Cold War.

The Great American Backslide and Our Silent Partnership with Darkness

The Great American Backslide and Our Silent Partnership with Darkness
Author: M. Rene Lauzier
Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2024-03-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

Change is accelerating and the world of 2023 is unrecognizable from the world that existed just five years ago. In a very subtle and incremental manner, American society has been transformed from what once was the world's premiere super-power, a country that was exalted as an example of freedom, justice, morality, and liberty, into a divided group of many tribes, cultures, and political and special interest groups often lacking a moral compass. We go with the loudest tribe fitting our basic ideals or choose to go it alone. And when we try to avoid the many tribes of destruction, we often tend to adopt the idol of the god of self. Community and unity are being left to die a slow, painful death. America's true north has become obscured because we decided to forego God as the light for our path. This has allowed us to quickly forget the race worth running as well as those foundational values that once comprised what we stood for as a country. But how did we get here and how can the trend of moral decay and divisiveness be reversed? The Great American Backslide came about as a result of not just understanding that our natural tendency as humans is to be selfish and sinful, but knowing we are being given substantial assistance by the dominion of darkness. This book will take us through an analysis of biblical, secular, and non-secular explanations of the existence of evil; how it induces cultural paradigm shifts aimed to ultimately separate us from God; how evil leverages our emotions, our brain chemistry, and our sinful human nature to manipulate subtle and incremental compromises of truth; how evil sustains itself and creates ever-increasing moral decay leading to further evil through a cycle of depravity; and how we can go about living in opposition to evil influences upon our world.

Great Power Peace and American Primacy

Great Power Peace and American Primacy
Author: J. Baron
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137299487

This book explains the period of great power peace in the last fifty years and outlines the path to perpetuating it. Drawing on the Realist tradition and challenging conventional wisdom about the causes of American primacy, Baron explores contributions to peace made by the balance of power, nuclear weapons, democracy and globalization.

Four Threats

Four Threats
Author: Suzanne Mettler
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781250244420

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that to the contrary, the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present. In The Four Threats, Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power – alone or in combination – have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived, so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment is that all four conditions are present in American politics today. This formidable convergence marks the contemporary era as an especially grave moment for democracy in the United States. But history provides a valuable repository from which contemporary Americans can draw lessons about how democracy was eventually strengthened — or in some cases weakened — in the past. By revisiting how earlier generations of Americans faced threats to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, we can see the promise and the peril that have led us to the present and chart a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy.

When the Stars Begin to Fall

When the Stars Begin to Fall
Author: Theodore R. Johnson
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0802157874

A “persuasive . . . heartfelt and vividly written” call to counter systemic racism and build national solidarity in America (Publishers Weekly). The American Promise enshrined in our Constitution states that all men and women are inherently equal. And yet racism continues to corrode our society. If we cannot overcome it, Theodore Johnson argues, the promise that made America unique on Earth will have died. In When the Stars Begin to Fall, Johnson presents a compelling blueprint for the kind of national solidarity necessary to mitigate racism. Weaving together history, personal memories, and his family’s multi-generational experiences with racism, Johnson posits that solutions can be found in the exceptional citizenship long practiced in Black America. Understanding that racism is a structural crime of the state, he argues that overcoming it requires us to recognize that a color-conscious society—not a color-blind one—is the true fulfillment of the American Promise. Fueled by Johnson’s ultimate faith in the American project, grounded in his family’s longstanding optimism and his own military service, When the Stars Begin to Fall is an urgent call to undertake the process of overcoming what has long seemed intractable.