Chalmers Johnson, 1931–2010

last updated 8 January 2015

Chalmers Johnson “had a penchant for upending conventional wisdom”—and for upsetting those who espoused it, said The National Interest. His book MITI and the Japanese Miracle was considered heretical at the time of its 1982 publication for its suggestion that Japan’s economy didn’t follow the U.S. free-market model but was instead a kind of “hybrid capitalism,” subject to extensive government planning and control. Today, Johnson’s view has become the conventional wisdom.

Johnson developed an interest in Asia while serving in the Navy during the Korean War, said The Japan Times. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis that examined the Chinese communist revolution. He concluded that the revolutionaries won over the Chinese peasantry not with communist ideology but with appeals to hyper-nationalism.

All of Johnson’s books were informed by “a granular understanding of the political economy of competing nations,” said TheWashingtonNote.com. He applied that understanding to America’s role in the world order. One book, Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire, which examined the unintended consequences of America’s support for the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, “became the hottest book in the market” after the 9/11 attacks. He followed that with the so-called Empire trilogy, for which he’s best known today: Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis, and Dismantling the Empire. The books earned him a reputation as “one of the most successful chroniclers and critics of America’s foreign-policy designs around the world.”