Numerous American writers have linked military and economic overstretch to the end of the ‘American Century’ and predicted the collapse of the ‘American Empire’. Now, from Oliver Stone, the director of such films as Platoon (1986), and JFK (1991), and historian Peter Kuznick, we have a 780-page book and a twelve-part television series detailing the shortcomings of that empire. They focus not on US achievements, taking those to be well known, nor on the failings of other countries, but on ‘what America has done wrong’. Film is often accused of falsifying history, but in this case the book validates the film: indeed, its hundred pages of references contradict the ‘untold’ of the title. Much of this history of the United States has been told, and far from being ‘secret’, as the manuscript was originally called, it relies largely on published sources. ‘Unsanitised’ might be a better adjective, given the habits of speech, thought, and behaviour it describes, or perhaps ‘unexpurgated’. Stone, who enlisted for Vietnam and was wounded and decorated, and Kuznick, who, as a student, protested against that war, fearlessly reveal persistent deceptions and double standards in their country – as many writers elsewhere would not dare.

First, the deceptions. Conventional belief holds that the United States has no empire, even though in the nineteenth century it seized land from Native Americans, expanded its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, took over Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and part of Cuba from Spain, then acquired Hawaii and Alaska. Asserting that the postwar world ‘must be made safe for democracy’, Woodrow Wilson in 1918 talked up self-determination, disarmament, free trade and navigation, and the League of Nations, all of which the United States then failed to support. In the war and interwar years, American munitions companies made huge profits, including from Germany, by ‘arming the world to fight itself’, as Republican Senator Gerald Nye put it in 1934. Among American capitalists who profited from investments in Nazi Germany were Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two presidents, and Henry Ford, whom Hitler greatly admired. In November 1940, even as the United States was supplying armaments to Britain and inching toward participation in World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, standing for election, told voters, ‘You boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ Yet Churchill recorded that in August 1941 Roosevelt was seeking to create an ‘incident’ that would bring the United States into the war. It was not the first time America had done this, nor the last.

Gaining more territory after the war, the United States ceded independence to the Philippines, but kept its military bases there, as it did in Korea, Japan, Guam, Palau, Iceland, Panama, and, of course, Guantánamo Bay. American corporations in South and Central America, which were as exploitative as the European colonialists whom the United States so despised, could count on Washington’s supportive intervention. Yet Eisenhower was puzzled in 1953 that America couldn’t ‘get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us’. As Stone and Kuznick observe, the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned in his last speech was largely created during his presidency, when the United States took over from colonial France in Indochina with disastrous and long-lasting results. By the mid-1960s the United States had become, Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’. When the ‘blowback’ that Chalmers Johnson predicted in 2000 arrived on 9/11, the American response was the long-planned invasion of Iraq and the pointless occupation of Afghanistan. The US ‘empire of bases’ now covers three quarters of the world’s countries, including Australia, and national and multinational security industries have grown enormously. Their job, a former Bush adviser candidly admitted to a Washington audience in February, is to frighten people so that they go on believing in the need for defence.

Now for double standards. Stone and Kuznick recall the hypocrisy of Wilson, Stanley Baldwin, and W.M. Hughes in 1919 talking up peace and freedom but refusing Japan’s proposal for a racial-equality clause in the protocol of the League. Three state governors in 1942 proposed Hitlerian methods for getting rid of Japanese Americans, and one declared, ‘We want to keep this a white man’s country.’ The Nazis pointed out to Roosevelt that as the United States discriminated against black Americans, it should not tell Germany what to do about Jews. (A similar point, Stone and Kuznick record, was made by the Kremlin in the mid-1970s to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.) Europeans had long experience in killing, lies, and discrimination, but by the twentieth century they did not claim that their nations were indispensable, exceptional, or a ‘city of light’ to whose civilised standards others should aspire, as did Americans. Publisher Henry Luce, a pre-war admirer of Mussolini, in 1941 declared that it was the United States’ duty and opportunity ‘to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit’. In 1944, during the incendiary bombing of over a hundred Japanese cities, War Secretary Henry Stimson worried that Americans’ reputation for atrocities might outdo Hitler’s, and others realised that, if they lost the war, they could be war criminals. Worse, by dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities – unnecessarily, Stone and Kuznick argue – Truman enabled his successors to threaten to use them again. Several came perilously close to doing so, while misreading or ignoring initiatives for peace and disarmament from communist leaders. Having helped establish the United Nations, they demanded that others obey international norms which the United States flouted, in a dismal progression from Agent Orange and My Lai to Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. Four months before the shocking pictures of Iraqi prisoners emerged, Bush declared Iraq ‘free of rape rooms and torture chambers’. The current president, with his penchant for drone strikes, can and does repress and execute people at will, including US citizens, behaviour he would find atrocious if Saddam, Gaddafi, or Bashar al-Assad committed it. Now that some fifty other countries have drones too, Americans’ double standards may come back to bite them – and us. But this searing indictment of the United States lets us off lightly, mentioning Australia briefly six times, and the ANZUS Treaty not at all.