November 20th will mark twelve years since the greatest of my few masters, Chalmers Johnson, left us all. Without him, we would see Japan, China, and the United States of America, his homeland, differently. I do not consider it a coincidence for a thinker of such great stature (historian, economist and political scientist) that in the last decade of his life he wrote a trilogy on the American empire and the end days of the American republic (democracy). He has been called a communist, an enemy of America, a 'paid spy' for his opinions in these three volumes, when he was nothing more or less than one of the few who cultivated social science according to strict ethical criteria. I have already written about the beginning of our one-sided acquaintance, but let me recall it again, for it is still vivid in my mind. I was a novice in all respects in Japan (as a visiting teacher) when I watched my favourite evening programme, The Sunrise, because it could be followed in English (I did not recognise anything in Japanese at the time except accents and tones). There was a sympathetic older man sitting in his California home, a single kitten sleeping in an armchair on either side of him. The occasion for the interview was the publication of his then much expanded book, the first to recount the history of a ministry that played a crucial role in the Japanese economy in the twentieth century (the Ministry of Industry and Trade, published in English (later in Japanese), MITI and the Japanese Miracle. 1925-1975). It was a history of Japanese industrial policy, and as such it provoked huge controversy not only in Japan but worldwide. Since then, industrial policy, the market approach and the actions of a skilled bureaucracy, have been criticised by a library of authors, and today are simply considered 'out of date' by many scholars. Chalmers Johnson, the interviewee, at one point in the all-important conversation, to relieve some of the perceived tension with the reporter, introduced his two cats. One was called MITI and the other Ókurasó (meaning Ministry of Finance). The two kittens, at the sound of their names, stirred a little in their armchairs and then went back to sleep peacefully. It was then that I decided to read all of Chalmers Johnson's available writings. At least four generations have grown up, some of whom are still turning this volume as a basic work. (I am one of them.) However, around 2008, when Johnson made several visits to Okinawa, the largest of the US military bases in East Asia, he was, in his own words, shocked and with extraordinary honesty to revisit his earlier views of America's role in the world, and so was born, first a volume of edited essays on Okinawa, and then a trilogy. He likened Okinawa to the Berlin Wall, since the 90,000 or so 'temporarily stationed' American troops there at the time represented for him the uninterrupted continuation of the Cold War. He began his research with US military bases, continued with US 'stealth' expansion, and then realised that the slow but sure erosion and death of American democracy was caused by US imperial ambitions and their complete 'success'. The first volume of his trilogy, "Boomerang" (in English, Blowback) was published almost a year before the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001. At the time of its release, hardly anyone paid attention to this volume, and then, a few days after the terrorist attack, the publisher could not stop taking tens of thousands of orders. Johnson's contention (in this volume) is that what the US did between 1950 and 2000 in the name of exporting democracy was the greatest threat to American society itself. Put another way, in the years after the Cold War (and its apparent end), the US administration, in collaboration with the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, successfully overthrew governments resulting from domestic democratic elections in every country where its economic or financial interests were threatened, either in theory or in fact. With the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which each of the US presidents celebrated as a victory of his own, the overdose of the 'drunk with victory' idea of the end of history encouraged the US government, the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon to further expand, even more intensively and violently than before. After September 2001, the US Senate passed a series of laws giving the US President extraordinary powers, many of which led to the curtailment of individual and institutional freedoms contrary to the US Constitution. According to Johnson, US imperial ambitions were largely to blame for the terrorist attacks of September 2001. At the time, this was not something a Republican or a Democratic senator could publicly admit. The most serious problem - as Johnson points out in the second and third volumes of his trilogy - is that American society knows nothing about the imperial ambitions of its country, which, far from being suspended after the September 2001 attacks, became even more pronounced (see, for example, the attack on Iraq on the basis of a lie that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction, since that was the justification for the military invasion of Iraq.) Anyone can read (unfortunately only in English) the trilogy, so I think it unnecessary to give even a brief summary of the volumes. What is more important, and this is the purpose of this writing, is that Chalmers Johnson's claim that economic and financial expansion is contrary to the whole of the American democratic system, 24 February 2022, i.e. Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine, is a "test" of the validity of this claim (or even a refutation of it.) In the last nine months, the consensus opinion (because dissent only gains publicity and popularity in a negative context) is that America has finally come out on the right side, supporting Ukraine's state independence and territorial integrity against Russian imperial ambitions. The majority of the European Union member states have joined this good side, as these countries are also NATO members (Hungary, although a NATO member, is also on a separate path, but this is beyond the scope of this analysis.) Although Ukraine cannot yet be a de jure NATO member, it has been a de facto member since 24 February. Although Ukraine does not have a functioning state apparatus (this was the case even before its invasion) corruption (similar to that in Russia) is rife. Moreover, the average reader and TV viewer knows nothing about the substantial changes in Ukraine's financial and economic situation since the war. What can be guessed is that the Ukrainian government has been using elements of war economy, albeit partial, since the invasion of the country. This could not be otherwise, because, although this is a so-called proxy war, the ongoing Russian attacks on its infrastructure have created shortages of energy, food and other consumer goods. These shortages, which (also) affect millions of civilians, can only be alleviated by administrative and military control. It is not known whether and to what extent industrial and mining production exists, nor whether Ukraine's food supply is uninterrupted. However, it is common knowledge in the West that the vast majority of weapons, tanks, drones, missiles and anti-missile equipment are the result of the high-tech military industries of the US and EU Member States. In other words, on the one hand, the EU Member States are facing, albeit to varying degrees, rising energy costs, general inflation (and the dangerous social consequences of this), while the strongest economies (Germany, France) are all 'compensating' with increasing military production and exports to Ukraine. The expanding orders from the US industrial-warfare complexes and the expansion of UK arms production are of course contributing to the Ukrainian victories in the war in Ukraine so far. Billions in aid, billions in loans to rebuild Ukraine in the future, more and more media and government enthusiastic words of support: Ukraine will win. The most economically and financially powerful in the free Western world (except Japan) are pitted against an autocratic Putin-led Russia with openly imperial ambitions. Ukraine will therefore join the free world, although the timing is uncertain. But. The daily exhortations to victory, the relentless (highly effective) propaganda of Zelensky and the presence of US and UK military experts in Poland, from where they control the entire logistics of the war, are likely to reassure the (peace-loving) citizens of the free world that "we are the stronger". The economic and financial sanctions against Russia are increasingly effective, and Ukraine, with a tenth of Russia's military expenditure, will therefore win. There can be no question of a peace agreement, because its basic conditions contradict Putin's imperial ambition to annex Ukraine. However, the balance of power suggests that there is a significantly weakened EU, there is a US administration not yet dominated by Trump and his supporters in foreign policy, and there is, before anyone can forget it, China, which also has an authoritarian regime based on a combination of one-party rule and market development, led by President Xi, who looks set to lead China for the rest of his life. China also has imperial ambitions - it wants to annex Taiwan - so although China is currently the world's second strongest economy, it is also an adversary of the free world. Although the US government, in full agreement with the Senate, passed a ban on the export of advanced technology products from US companies to China this summer, this unfortunately does not change the fact that the vast majority of countries in the free world are now dependent on the Chinese economy in many ways. Any claim to the contrary is an illusion. So today, at the time of writing, there are two countries asserting their authoritarian imperial ambitions through war or, in the case of China, through the threat of armed conflict. China and Russia. There is, on the other hand (?), the US fight for democracy in Ukraine, there is (indirectly, of course) the Pelosi visit to Taiwan, which has needlessly provoked the Chinese government, but demonstrated that the US is ready to defend Taiwan's (hitherto) independence. The bottom line is apparently ad hoc scraped together daily news. There are two social scientists today who clearly see, try to write and say in various international fora that whether from Europe or from any locality in the US, the Russia-Ukraine war since 24 February is without doubt again a war of systems. One is Noam Chomsky, the other is Wolfgang Streeck of Germany. Chomsky, in an interview a few weeks ago, when asked what would happen if the US went directly to war with China, sadly replied only that all our lives would end. And Wolfgang Streeck, in the New Left Review's Sidecar periodical, analysed that neither the German government nor German society is aware of what is at stake in this Russian-Ukrainian war, which, however crass it may sound, is the most important thing for the US at the moment. What would Chalmers Johnson say to all this?