"Diana Johnstone is without question among the most distinguished journalists of her generation. She is that rare professional who achieves the high, thinly populated ground wherein journalists meet public intellectuals, historians, philosophers, and littérateurs. World Watcher ranges widely and wisely. I love this book for its sure-footed variety. Johnstone’s mind and pen move with ease and always with worthy insight from the Russian Revolution to European politics―her pieces on Germany and Yugoslavia are especially pithy―through to 9.11, terrorism, “conspiracy theories,” and Joe Biden’s excesses. This is a not-to-be missed display of the exceptional breadth of Johnstone’s work and the depth of her thinking over many decades."
——PATRICK LAWRENCE, The Floutist

World Watcher: On Manufacturing War is an anthology of articles on the relentless effort of Trans-Atlantica – the United States and its NATO partners – to overcome peace and perpetuate war, selected by a veteran analyst on world affairs from an oeuvre of her published works spanning the past quarter century.
Diana Johnstone demonstrates how the end of the Cold War, rather than bringing about world peace, made it clear that “the communist threat” had above all served as a pretext for aggressive militarization Subsequent pretexts focusing on human rights violations, “authoritarianism” and imaginary scenarios were to follow. A new age of endless war has been deliberately manufactured by the dominating powers of finance, mass media, entrenched institutions and opportunistic politicians.

This book addresses:
• the ideological aspects of Western aggressivity.
• the opening act of NATO’s rebirth as aggressive war-maker with the destruction of Yugoslavia, using humanitarian pretexts to preserve and extend hegemony.
• the murderous Western assault on Israel’s adversaries in the Near East,
• the degraded political systems of the United States and its European dependencies as governance is reduced to support for financial capitalism, the military industry and war, and
• the relentless Western effort to revise its alliance of World War II by using Ukrainian ultra-nationalism to defeat and eventually even dismantle Russia.

The greatest danger to the United States and Europe is not any external enemy or foreign ideology, but their own arrogant commitment to pursuing an enduring world hegemony. Trans-Atlantica’s destructive hostility toward the rest of the world is accompanied by a general decline in standards of education, social tranquillity and economic well-being for the majority of its own people. Their publics’ understanding of the world is distorted by mainstream media, which teaches them to accept violence as the effective, indeed only, way to settle differences. War is being constantly manufactured between nations, within targeted nations and even at home between identity groups.

Historically inept Western politicians are leading their nations to disaster. As at this writing, it is by no means clear how Western populations can find the political means to change course.

Diana Johnstone, Ph.D. A native of Minnesota, raised in New Deal Washington, Diana Johnstone has spent most of her life in Europe as a political observer and journalist, working for Agence France Presse, for In These Times as European Correspondent, and as press officer for the Green Group in the European Parliament. She is coauthor with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, of From Mad to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions and Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher