Petras provides clear insight into how the depression and regional wars that originated in Washington and on Wall Street are spreading throughout the world, demolishing the ideology of free market neo-liberalism and forcing to the forefront the need for structural changes. This book exposes the unsustainability of the United States military-driven empire building based on a volatile speculative economy, and influenced by Zionist policy markers committed to the colonialist state of Israel, irrespective of US interests. It offers a critical study of the decline of the US empire, its causes, ramification, and possible future outcomes. The collapse of the capitalist free market and the need for large-scale, long-term interventions by the state have once again raised the question of whose interest states are presently promoting, and how the interests of the world s people might be better pursued.