As the Exceptional Empire gets ready to brave a destructive – and self-destructive – new cycle, with dire, unforeseen consequences bound to reverberate across the world, now more than ever it is absolutely essential to go back to the imperial roots.

The task is fully accomplished by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, $26.96) by Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

Here, in painstaking detail, we can learn who shaped the contours of US “internationalism,” when and why, in a roomful of mirrors always disguising the real, ultimate aim: empire.

Wertheim’s book was superbly reviewed by Paul Kennedy. Here we will concentrate on the crucial plot twists taking place throughout 1940. Wertheim’s main thesis is that the fall of France in 1940 – and not Pearl Harbor – was the catalyzing event that led to the full imperial hegemony design.