Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right

For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the world’s most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. In a steady stream of books, articles, interviews, and speeches, he has repeatedly sought to expose Washington’s costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United States’ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface, The Myth of American Idealism was written to “draw insights from across [Chomsky’s] body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” It accomplishes that task admirably.

As the title suggests, the central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions. Americans are constantly reminded by their leaders that they are an “indispensable nation” and “the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” and assured that moral principles will be at the “center of U.S. foreign policy.” Such self-congratulatory justifications are then endlessly echoed by a chorus of politicians and establishment intellectuals.

For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the world’s most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. In a steady stream of books, articles, interviews, and speeches, he has repeatedly sought to expose Washington’s costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United States’ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface, The Myth of American Idealism was written to “draw insights from across [Chomsky’s] body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” It accomplishes that task admirably.

As the title suggests, the central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions. Americans are constantly reminded by their leaders that they are an “indispensable nation” and “the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” and assured that moral principles will be at the “center of U.S. foreign policy.” Such self-congratulatory justifications are then endlessly echoed by a chorus of politicians and establishment intellectuals.

For Chomsky and Robinson, these claims are nonsense. Not only did the young American republic fulfill its Manifest Destiny by waging a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population, but it has since backed a bevy of brutal dictatorships, intervened to thwart democratic processes in many countries, and waged or backed wars that killed millions of people in Indochina, Latin America, and the Middle East, all while falsely claiming to be defending freedom, democracy, human rights, and other cherished ideals. U.S. officials are quick to condemn others when they violate international law, but they refuse to join the International Criminal Court, the Law of the Sea Treaty, and many other global conventions. Nor do they hesitate to violate the United Nations Charter themselves, as U.S. President Bill Clinton did when he went to war against Serbia in 1999 or as President George W. Bush did when he invaded Iraq in 2003. Even when undeniably evil acts are exposed—such as the My Lai massacre, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and the CIA’s torture program—it is low-level personnel who get punished while the architects of these policies remain respected members of the establishment.

The record of hypocrisy recounted by Chomsky and Robinson is sobering and convincing. No open-minded reader could absorb this book and continue to believe the pious rationales that U.S. leaders invoke to justify their bare-knuckled actions.

The book is less persuasive, however, when it tries to explain why U.S. officials act this way. Chomsky and Robinson argue that the “the public’s role in decision-making is limited” and that “foreign policy is designed and implemented by small groups who derive their power from domestic sources.” In their view, U.S. foreign policy is largely the servant of corporate interests—the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and “major corporations, banks, investment firms, … and policy-oriented intellectuals who do the bidding of those who own and manage the private empires that govern most aspects of our lives.”

The importance of special interests is beyond question, as is the broader public’s limited role, but the picture is more complicated than they suggest. For starters, when corporate profits and national security interests clash, the former often lose out. For example, when Dick Cheney ran Halliburton, an oil-services company in the 1990s, he complained about the “sanction-happy” foreign policy that prevented the company from making money in Iran. Other U.S. oil companies would have liked to invest there, as well, but U.S. sanctions remained firmly in place. Similarly, tech companies like Apple oppose recent U.S. efforts to limit China’s access to advanced technologies because these restrictions threaten their bottom line. The restrictions might indeed be misguided, but the point is that corporate interests do not always call the tune.

Chomsky and Robinson also acknowledge that other great powers acted in much the same way that the United States has, and these states also invented elaborate moral justifications—the “white man’s burden,” la mission civilisatrice, the need to protect socialism—to whitewash their atrocious conduct. Given that this behavior preceded the emergence of modern corporate capitalism (let alone the military-industrial complex), it suggests that these policies have more to do with the logic of great power competition than the specific demands of the corporate United States. And if noncapitalist powers acted in similar ways, then something else is encouraging states to jettison their values to gain an edge on rivals, or to prevent them from gaining a similar edge themselves. For realists, that something else is the fear of what might happen if other states became stronger and decided to use their power in harmful ways.

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