Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books). His new book, just published, is Cold War on Five Continents: The Geopolitics of Empire & Espionage.