Tip of the Spear

by Alfred Peredo Flores

2023 · Cornell University Press

In Tip of the Spear, Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarized islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to regulate all travel to and from the island, and a tourist economy eventually emerged that changed the relationship between the Indigenous CHamoru population and the US military, further complicating the process of settler colonialism on the island. The US military occupation of Guåhan was based on a co-constitutive process that included CHamoru land dispossession, discursive justifications for the remaking of the island, the racialization of civilian military labor, and the military's policing of interracial intimacies. Within a narrative that emphasizes CHamoru resilience, resistance, and survival, Flores uses a working class labor analysis to examine how the militarization of Guåhan was enacted by a minority settler population to contribute to the US government's hegemonic presence in Oceania.

In the Shadows of the American Century

by Alfred W. McCoy

2017 · Haymarket Books

The award-winning historian delivers a "brilliant and deeply informed" analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration ( New York Journal of Books). In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America's rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle. From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America's attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.